Gas price-hike to”finish off” Belarusian economy :: Charter'97 :: News

Price rise for Russian energy carriers may cause slowing down of the Belarusian economic growth by 10-15 % of the GDP in total over the period up to 2012. According to the ITAR-TASS press agency such estimation is given in the press release of the IMF on a regular survey of the Belarusian economy.

Press-release authors admit that Belarus has succeeded considerably in its socio-economic development and gained remarkable macroeconomic indicators. Usually in such cases the IMF experts pay compliments to the state authorities’ policy.

As far as Minsk is concerned the praises sound more like reprimands, it is reported, for instance, that until recently “the state has been redistributing over the economy in general” the retained profit accumulated at the expense of “beneficial prices for Russian power resources”, thus, “giving impetus to development of the internal demand”. Or that the country’s” economic development was stimulated by “specially designated beneficial loans of the sate-owned banks” and” wage rise to the authorities order exceeded the labor efficiency at the state-owned enterprises “.

Summing up the above –mentioned we may understand that high social indicators of Belarus, i.e. equal distribution of income , high index of human development assigned by the UNO, betterment of living conditions” of the population have been gained by supposedly ” wrong” means.

The difference in accentuating the estimates by the experts of the IMF, on the one hand, and the members of the IMF board of directors, i.e. representatives of the governments of its member-states on the other hand, seems strange and outstanding for the IMF document of this kind. In the general appraisal the latter also underlined the gains of Belarus revealed through “rapid economic growth and inflation decline”. In their comments they remarked that those gains resulted from generally cautious financial and budget and monetary and credit policy as well as the powerful economic growth of the partner countries” of Belarus. Only after that they stated that “until 2006 the growth generally accounted for favorable conditions of the energy import”.

The IMF experts expressed their opinion in the press-release that in Belarus there exists” actual dependence of the national currency rate on the US dollar” and that, to their mind, “the real exchange rate is overstated by around 10%”.