Russia in April: economic performance is uneven across sectors but doesn’t surprise

RUSSIA ECONOMICS - In Brief 26 May 2020 by Alexander Kudrin

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Rosstat released preliminary statistics for April and reported that retail was strongly down m-o-m and y-o-y - by 28.5% (not seasonally adjusted) and by 23.3% respectively. A very deep contraction was generally expected, but the published figures will help to come up with a more reliable macroeconomic economic outlook for 2020 as a whole. The 4m20 tally fell by 2.8% y-o-y. Food retail reportedly contracted by 15.2% m-o-m and by 9.3% y-o-y. Respectively contraction in the non-food segment was much deeper (41.0% m-o-m and 36.7% y-o-y). These numbers may have been a bit better in reality, particularly in the food segment as food production was up by 3.7% y-o-y. Production of various food products was strongly up y-o-y, including fresh meat, milk, milk products, vegetables, cereal grains, and many others. In some cases, this increase in production posted either high single-digit growth or even double-digit.It could be the case that similar to 2015-2016 when Rosstat reported an unreasonably deep contraction of food consumption for two consecutive years (it was reportedly much worse than in 1992, which is hard to believe) some currently released numbers maybe not immune from similar statistical miscalculation. Whenever the ruble falls, as happened in April 2020 and import contracts significantly, the share of domestically produced and consumed goods goes up (but it is unclear by how much at the moment) while the consumption basket is taken from some previous year when the share of imported goods was higher. Hence the room for some statistical errors. It is always a challenging task for the statistical agencies to capture sudden changes in the structure of the economy or some...