Cbank: Russian economy can recover to 2019 level in Jan–Mar 2022

MOSCOW, Jul 28 (PRIME) -- The Russian economy will recover to the level of 2019 only in January–March 2022, Central Bank’s First Deputy Chairwoman Ksenia Yudayeva said at a conference on Tuesday.

“We see that recovery of the economy to the level of 2019 will happen only sometime in the first quarter of 2022 and it would return to the trend that we saw before (the pandemic) sometime by the end of 2022,” she said.

The crisis will also lead to structural changes in the economy connected to digitalization and job preferences, as people will work more in remote formats and do less business trips.

“These structural shifts have an obvious impact on potential growth dynamics. We would like the mid-term and the long-term impacts to be positive so that we use this stress as an opportunity to speed up our economic development,” she said.

Last week, the central bank narrowed its forecasts for dynamics of Russia’s gross domestic product (GDP), it now expects GDP to fall 4.5–5.5% in 2020, to rise 3.5–4.5% in 2021 and to increase 2.5–3.5% in 2022.

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