OREANDA-NEWS. Young Chul Kim, Head of the Minsk Office of the World Bank (WB).

The chief of the WB representative office in Belarus made a statement to this effect in the framework of the October Economic Forum.

"Belarus depends to a great extent on the Russian market. It is unlikely the pace of economic development in Russia will support economic growth in Belarus. Even in the light of the recent changes relating to Belarus' accelerated food exports to Russian amid the Russian import embargo on products from Western states, it is unlikely that it will have an impact," Young Chul Kim said.

The WB representative suggested analyzing the integral components of Belarus' economic growth.

"We see that agricultural production in Belarus has stopped growing and started to reduce. We also see that assembly production demonstrates a declining trend - we are speaking about production, not sales. The construction sector, which has been playing a key role in the last few years, is also on the way down. The only sector, which supports economic growth, is retail trade: this is when someone sells something, as opposed to real production. The question is how stable is this situation?" Young Chul Kim said.

The WB representative informed that because of wage growth in the public sector, wage growth in general has exceeded labour productivity.

In his words, the WB insists that wage growth must be firmly pegged to the growth index of labour productivity. Looking at the way things were in early 2013, the gap between the growth of labour productivity and wage growth has continued to increase, but the pace has slowed down, Young Chul Kim said.