Penza, 17 November 2015. PenzaNews. The Russian economy has dropped down 13-14% in 2015, far below the official figures, suggested Vladislav Zhukovsky, economist, stock market expert, financial consultant, during the 5th “Business Development” forum that takes place in Penza on Tuesday, November 17.

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“I would like to remind you that we all heard official reports in Q2 saying Russian economy has dropped by around 4.6%. According to officials, that was not that bad, that was even good, because the predicted drop was 7-10%,” he noted.

However, the event speaker pointed out that “nobody explained how the material gross economy output was calculated.”

“Most interestingly, Rosstat managed to draw out a 6-percent GDP deflator after Q2. Again: with an inflation of 16%, with a producer price index of 13%, they tell us the deflator in Russia is 6%,” Vladislav Zhukovsky said.

He added that the situation that is ongoing since 2013, where the producer price index continues to grow, inflation is accelerating, but the deflator “becomes more and more beautiful,” is a paradox.

According to the expert, that gives all reasons to increase the official figures on the decline in Russian economy by 8-10 percentage points.

“So that makes the slope in economy reach around 12-15%. So if we remove all manipulations with the deflator and the price index, the real drop in economy this year is about 13-14%. Last year, the drop was around 4-5%. In the next year, even if they draw out a zero-sum dynamic, the real drop in economy will still constitute about 6-7%,” the economist suggested.

In his opinion, the talk about a “layer of fat” created by devaluation and a sharp increase in profitability of production is nothing but an attempt at misleading.

To back his words, Vladislav Zhukovsky listed the figures stating that all financial variables in economy have dropped in the years of 2013 and 2014.

“As for 2015, yes, indeed, until Q1 we could see a nearly twofold increase in profits,” the expert said, noting that 98% of companies that registered such profits work in extraction of oil, gas, precious metals, as well as oil refining, oil chemistry and fertilizer production.

“Other fields of economy, SMEs in particular, are very much high and dry. When it comes to them, there’s not even an increase in profits – there is a sharp drop, seen in the papers on tax collection, especially for the joint imputed earnings tax,” Vladislav Zhukovsky stressed.