Just give Russia 20 years of a peaceful respite internally
and externally and you will not recognize it.
Stolypin P.A.
INTRODUCTION
Russia is now in a fathomless crisis. Despite its negative effect on Russia"s economy this crisis should be regarded not as something abnormal, but as a natural phenomenon in the development of the country"s economic system.
The crisis is a signal of the danger that the system may continue to develop in a certain way, of the need for specific measures to be taken to do away with the existing contradictions.
The objective contradictions immanent in any self-developing system become critical at a certain stage to overflow at this point into a cyclic, structural, stock exchange or other crisis of economic development.
Crises lay bare the basic entropic elements of the previous stage of growth, throw light on the ineffective functioning of individual components of the economic mechanism, structural discrepancies in the structure of material production, the burden of speculative crediting, breakdowns in the monetary and financial system, and changing consumer demand.
No matter how deep is the financial and economic crisis in Russia it is sure, under the laws of market economy development, to be followed sooner or later by a recovery, growing business activity, and finally by economic expansion.
Russia boasts of immense natural and labor resources and a vast scientific and technological potential which can help not only overcome the crisis, but over a longer-term perspective make Russia a leading, prosperous world power.
The materialization of Russia"s economic and investment potential may quicken the overcoming of the crisis, especially galvanizing its foreign economic relations which may serve as a catalyst of economic growth.
Today no country in the world can make successful headway without integration into the world economy. There is a direct proportional dependence between the degree of a country"s integration into the world economy and this country"s level of economic growth. As a rule, the more a country integrates into the world economic space the higher is the rate and level of its economic development, and the other way around.
In the modern world economy foreign economic relations constitute an important exogenous factor which substantially affects the dynamics and stability of national economic development, and helps form the structure of the national economy and ensure its efficient operation.
For many a country, quickened expansion of their foreign economic relations served as a catalyst of home economic growth. Specifically, this concerns the new industrial countries whose foreign economic relations played the basic structure-forming role in defining the pattern of stable dynamic economic growth.
Foreign economic relations play a special role in global integration processes. The present-day world economic activity is characterized by dynamism, specialization by countries and regions, liberalized and unified or uniform national and international agreements-governed state regulation, and diversified forms and types of foreign economic activity.
