Geneva, July 21 (RIA Novosti, Yekaterina Andrianova) - Russian GDP growth will slow down to an annual rate of 5.8% by the end of this year, from last year's 7.3 percent, and will slide another 0.2 percentage points down in 2006, United Nations economists predicted in a report.
Experts of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, which groups 55 member states, noted in this year's second edition of their Economic Survey of Europe that Russia is still suffering from what is known as the Dutch Disease, with windfall oil revenues making the national currency appreciate too fast and thereby undermining the competitiveness of local producers. As a result of this tendency, manufacturing industries go into recession while services sectors experience an upsurge, thanks mostly to a high rate of consumer spending.
Other economies in the CIS will continue to perform quite well in the next couple of years, but will also see their GDP growth slow down somewhat, the ECE survey predicted. The average CIS growth rate will drop to 6.2 percent this year, from 8.1% in 2004, and further down to 5.9% in 2006.
In the long term, the pace of GDP growth in CIS nations will depend on how effective they prove to be in diversifying their economies and effecting key reforms in the industrial and financial sectors.
According to ECE forecasts, the Ukrainian GDP will grow at 6% in 2005 - half of last year's rate of 12.1 % - and is likely to go another percentage point down in 2006.
The Belarusian economy will continue to show high growth rates owing to steady demand for goods exported to neighboring Russia. Belarus' GDP is expected to grow at a rate of 9% this year, as compared with 11% last year, and at 7.5% in 2006.
Azerbaijan's economy will grow by 14% in 2005, against 10.2% last year, and by 15% in 2006, partly thanks to the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline, which has started operating to capacity.
