Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
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.
Growth projections have been slashed across the board, but all of your links except the first predict a good growth rate for Russia and always better than Eurozone.

The first is rather weird, but they predicted 0.25% growth for the last quarter while in reality it was 0.8%.

The fourth mentions "bleak outlooks" but the entire article consists of weasel words, without mentioning a single figure anywhere.

Russia has one huge obstacle to reach living standards of richest western nations, and that is diversification of its economy. Regardless how successful that reform is, economic growth in Asia and Africa will keep the price of resources and energy high for the foreseeable future, which means Russian economy is safe for the next several decades. If they manage to pull off a proper reform, living standards will most certainly reach western levels, and probably be ahead of almost all EU countries.