Ukraine Thread

[Montmorency]

Not everyone can increase in power relative to others. That's impossible.

In absolute terms, clearly they can and have.

But if you want to focus on relative terms - note that Russia wasn't coming from a very (economically) strong place itself (i.e. the 90s). The idea is that by now it has exhausted its potential for rapid, or possibly even sustained, growth.

Here are some links:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/russia/forecast
http://www.inforum.umd.edu/papers/co...012_slides.pdf
http://www.oecd.org/berlin/50405107.pdf (Table 4.1 esp.)
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/wef-russia-...r-putin-427882
http://www.consiglioveneto.it/crvpor...AL_11_2012.pdf (Figure 9 and Annex Table

Note the low growth figures in GDP absolute and per capita, the shrinking working-age population, and the static allocation of industries in growth (i.e. lack of diversification). Obviously countries across the world will work toward closing the gap with China and the US, but in the above projections it seems the US will actually have slightly-larger long-term growth in GDP than Russia.


A much more important game for Russia than Ukrainian territory or whatever now (and in the long-term) is control of the Arctic Circle, which Canada, Norway, UK, Sweden, Japan, and of course the US are poised to compete in.