“…In real terms, they contracted by an average of 6.6 percent in 2009, a fall of 12.1 percentage points from the growth attained in 2008. 2 The severity of the impact of the crisis on the CIS economies is mainly because the domi-nant economy in the CIS, that of the Russian Federation, was hit very hard by a combination of the fall in international oil prices and a reversal of international capital flows in 2008, while the other economies in the CIS are highly integrated with the Russian Federation through trade, migrant worker remittances 3 and capital flows (Alturki, Espinosa-Bowen and Ilahi, 2009).…”