Analysis of Recent Growth in Low-Income Cis Countries

Abstract

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. This paper analyzes factors that determine recent economic growth in the low-income countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States. 2 The main findings are as follows: (1) productivity gains in export-oriented sectors and expansion of exports may have become the main sources of growth in five of the seven CIS-7 countries, while in the early years of transition the output recovery was mainly driven by consumption; (2) economic growth has concentrated in agriculture and the raw material sectors, and, thus, is vulnerable to changes in external conditions; and (3) structural reforms matter for growth, which is consistent with previous research on growth in transition countries.

Reforms and growth in transition: Re-examining the evidence

“…19 Chart 3.6 of the 2003 Transition Report (EBRD, 2003) provides an illustration of the importance of exports to Russia for CIS countries. Loukoianova and Unigovskaya (2004) suggest that the recent high growth rates in low-income CIS countries are partly attributable to both catch-up effects and increased demand from Russia and other countries.…”

“…This paper is one of the few in the literature to incorporate a dynamic specification with a lagged dependent variable. Several papers support a positive effect of reforms on growth at a regional level, e.g., Loukoianova and Unigovskaya (2004) who focus on a group of low-income CIS countries.…”

Measuring CIS Health Systems Using the Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA)

“…Efficiency as an effective deviation in the context of stochastic frontier analysis became the subject of the studies about 50 years ago. Results of the conducted studies are described in the works of both foreign and Russian scientists [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. The gap was filled with the development of the SFA method under the leadership of Aigner, Lovell and Schmidt (1977) [17] and Meeusen and Van Den Broeck (1977) [18].…”

Enhancing the Prospects for Growth and Trade of the Kyrgyz Republic

“…Economic structure clearly plays some role in these results as, for instance, industrial output in Kazakhstan and Russia is heavily influenced by oil exports. But putting these countries aside, the data still indicate that the Kyrgyz Republic has a competitiveness gap with other countries in the region having similar economic structures (for further detailed analysis see Loukoianova and Unigovskaya (2004). It might also be noted that, while the Kyrgyz Republic's relative competitive ranking in the CIS can be a matter of some debate considering the quality of the data and issues of comparative economic structure, it is not the only important factor.…”