5/4/2014: Is Russian Trade Performance Really That Weak?

Here is another look at trade performance by various countries, this time based on BBVA synthetic index.

First: components of the index (darker colours mark stronger connectedness between trade and domestic economy):

Last: summary of the synthetic index rankings:

So core lesson here is that Russian economy performs right bang in the middle, set between UK and Australia… not bad. But when we look into the underlying drivers for this performance, technology is a weak driver, value retention by primary materials exporters is a major positive driver, specialisation patterns are nowhere to be seen and relevance to the economy is overall much weaker than we could have expected…