Russia's Foreign Trade

Russia is an active participant in international commerce. From year to year Russia develops its customs legislation to improve cooperation with other countries. Annually products of foreign manufacturers expand their share on Russian market. Russian companies prefer to import high-technology equipment from developed countries and their interest is fortified by improvement of competition among them. Russia increases its potential becoming more overt for foreign companies.

For clear understanding Russia's foreign trade policy, it is necessary to consider export and import structure.

Diag. 1 Russia's export structure

Mineral commodity 70%

Metals, precious stones and their products 13%

Chemical sector's products 6%

Machines, outfits and transport vehicles 5%

Wood and cellulose and paper products 3%

Food products and agricultural raw materials 2%

Other goods 1%

Mineral commodities are doubtless leaders among exported goods. Russia is one of the most resourced country that is why mineral commodities take great share in Russian export. However underdeveloped industrial construction does not allow to attain high indexes of machines and outfits export. Also there are problems in agricultural sector, that interfere to develop export of Food products abroad.

Diag. 2 Russia's import structure

Machines, outfits and transport vehicles 50%

Food products and agricultural raw materials 16%

Chemical sector's products 14%

Metals, precious stones and their products 7%

Textiles and textiles products 5%

Wood and cellulose and paper products 3%

Mineral commodity 2%

Other goods 3%

Machines and outfits domination in import is obvious on diagram 2 this is prove serious weakness and noncompetitiveness of Russian engineering industry. Only military industrial sector is traditionally developed because of high investments of government. Food industry in Russia is also undeveloped, foreign products compose 45% of Russian food market.

In recent years main foreign trade indexes are changed to wide extent, mainly because of influence of world-wide economic trends. Obviously that changes of foreign trade indexes in the period of last four years correlates to prices of raw hydrocarbons such as oil, gas, coal. For example, drop in oil's prices leads to decrease of its export volume, and this in turn results to reduction of export volume index in general.

Table 1 Main foreign trade indexes

It is easy to notice dynamics of main foreign trade indexes at the diagram. Noticeable that lowest indexes are traced in 2009, this is conditioned by recession and oil price downturn.

However, Russia is stepping out from crisis, and experts believe that positive dynamics will continue in 2011 either.

Table 2 Changes of foreign trade indexes in 2010 to past years.

Growth rate of foreign trade activity in 2010 is quite high, however indexes of 2010 fall behind of indexes of 2008. Russian foreign trade is trying to recover after recession 2009 and probably it will come up to indexes of 2008 in 2011.

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