OREANDA-NEWS. The recession was an inevitable scenario for the Russian economy after 2014, Western sanctions influenced this, but were not the main catalyst for the recession. This conclusion was reached by experts of the Center for Economic Research - Institute of the Czech Economy Anna Pestova and Mikhail Mamonov in their article “Is it Worry? The economic effect of financial sanctions on the Russian economy ”, prepared for the Bank of Finland Institute for Transition Economies (BOFIT).

Conclusions are based on forecasts made using the BVAR technique - Bayesian vector autoregressions. The goal of the analysts was to assess the economic effect of the sanctions imposed by Western countries in 2014. We studied 14 macroeconomic variables, divided into three groups: external, internal non-financial and internal financial indicators. For each variable, a backdated forecast for 2014–2015 was compiled, based only on a fall in oil prices (without sanctions), and a forecast that takes into account two factors — a fall in oil prices and limited access to external loans. The difference between these two forecasts was considered as the effect of sanctions.

Western financial sanctions definitely influenced the Russian economy, but were not the only driving force behind the crisis, the authors of the article note. The economic slowdown began about a year before the imposition of sanctions. The decline in economic growth continued in 2014, when annual GDP growth was 0.7%.

At the same time, American media experts at the end of 2018 calculated that due to sanctions and a number of other factors (such as structural changes in the economy and a slowdown in global growth), Russian GDP has not grown by an additional 6% since 2014.