OREANDA-NEWS. September 10, 2010. Rosstat released the long-awaited revision of its GDP time series yesterday after it has announced that it changed its base year for calculations from 2003 to 2008. As expected, the share of resource sectors in the new structure of GDP increased, which led to an upward revision of pre-crisis and post-crisis growth data and sharper declines for the critical stages of the crisis (4Q08, 2Q09 and 3Q09). The release of rebased GDP data for 2Q10 was postponed until today or tomorrow, reported the press-centre of OTKRITIE Financial Corporation.

View: The fact that in the new GDP time series Rosstat did not single out net taxes as a separate item in the GDP structure makes it almost impossible to closely analyze the changes that were made. YoY trends based on the new series show a stronger post-crisis bounce in resources, manufacturing and trade – a tendency that we believe is likely to support growth dynamics in the Russian economy going forward.

Action: Even more important is the fact that in the new time series Rosstat has downgraded its assessment of declines in GDP for 2Q09 and 3Q09. That automatically increases the base factor effect for 2Q10 and 3Q10, and consequently will push growth figures up significantly, despite a weak harvest and the slowdown in activity due to the heat wave. While our macroeconomic forecast is currently under review, we would not be surprised if Russia’s GDP growth rate in 2010 exceeds the current official forecast of 4%YoY, which should be a positive – albeit mostly statistical - development.

Official GDP growth series rebased (YoY %).