Economics Minister: Russia's economy still ailing, not recovering

Russia's Cabinet feels that the country has still not achieved a sustained economic growth in that its economy is highly susceptible to volatile trends in prices of export commodities, currency rates, and pricing of natural monopolies' services, Russian Economic Development and Trade Minister German Gref told a news conference in Moscow Thursday.

If sustained macroeconomic stability is to be achieved, Gref said, the Cabinet would need to take measures to reform the financial sector, stimulate more diversified exports, and protect the domestic market from imports that are damaging to national industries. Furthermore, keeping the inflation rate down and creating new production assets are also tasks to be attended to, added the minister.

He went on to reiterate his call for going beyond the pattern of economic growth that has emerged in the country in recent years, whereby demand is stimulated through exports. "If we cannot diversify the structure of production of gross domestic product, we cannot count on a sustained trend of economic growth and we will always depend on global economic factors," Gref argued. "The slowdown in growth had been predicted, we're ailing, and thus far, there are no serious signs of recovery," he pointed out.