OREANDA-NEWS. July 11, 2012. Over 1,800 one-on-one meetings between investors and company representatives were conducted in the framework of Renaissance Capital’s 16th Annual Investor Conference, which concluded on the 26th of June in Moscow.

Following the tradition of the previous years, the largest independent investor event in Russia and the CIS brought together hundreds of representatives of the political and business elite, as well as corporate and institutional investors and international experts in global economics and finance.

The economic potential of emerging markets, structural problems of European countries and the situation on the global resource markets were the central points of the discussion.

Given the difficulties which many Western economies are facing today, the emerging markets are becoming the new powerhouses of the world economy, noted Renaissance Capital CEO Stephen Jennings. He also outlined the steps which he considered key to improving Russia’s economy, and paid special attention to how the government might pursue simple changes in order to improve the ease of doing business in Russia, as well as the importance of Russian pension funds in securing the country’s economic stability. “With the right reforms, Russia can meet the 6-7% growth rates that the government needs to see in order to secure political stability. The foundations are better than many realise. Russia was the only BRIC country to see its GDP accelerate as we entered 2012. The right reforms, of course, will come from a political system that accepts change”, Jennings said.

Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich assured the forum’s guests that the government will take all necessary measures in order to improve the country’s investment climate, including privatization, which will be completed in accordance with the government’s stated agenda. “We are going to stick to the privatization plans that we have announced”, the Deputy Prime Minister said. The privatization programme will thus be completed by 2017. In case of unfavourable market conditions, there can be a delay of several months for certain transactions. “But if we have a crisis of the scale that we had in 2008-09, maybe we’ll postpone more“, Dvorkovich added.

The topic of a potential European crisis was one of the main points of Alexei Kudrin’s speech. According to the former Finance Minister’s forecast, in the 2nd quarter of 2012, the European economy will most likely show negative growth. Kudrin also stressed that Europe lacked the political will to face its current debt crisis. The speaker believes that Russia’s dependence on oil revenues should lessen, but that a sharp decrease in the price of oil might severely weaken the economy and negatively affect the state’s ability to fund public services. Kudrin supported the government’s plans regarding the introduction of fiscal rules, according to which expenditure ceilings are calculated using the average oil price over the previous ten years, noting that it would be “a very good stabilizer of budget expenditures”.

Ruben Aganbegyan addressed changes to the financial sector in his speech to the conference’s participants. The President of the MICEX-RTS stock exchange declared that “the first and foremost objective” of establishing Moscow as an international financial centre is that “the price discovery for assets originating from Russia and the CIS should be happening here, in Russia”. At the same time, the speaker noted, this centre shouldn’t be specific in any way.  The most important task is not to look for niches, but to strive to adopt international standards with respect to settlement, said Aganbegyan.

Other participants of the panel session, moderated by CNN host, Editor-at-large of Time magazine Fareed Zakaria, also discussed world commodity prices and their influence on exporters of natural resources, examined possible scenarios of Eurozone crisis and its negative impacts on Russian economy, as well as evaluated the prospects of development of BRICS group, African region and other emerging and frontier markets.