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Putin: Stateâ€™s role in economy will decline

29 September 2009 16:45 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA-Economics. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin pledged Tuesday that the state’s role in the economy would decrease in the coming years, as he touted the post-crisis Russia to investors, AFP reported.
One year after the global financial downturn raised the spectre of the state retaking huge stakes in private enterprise in exchange for bailouts, Putin said that fears of broad nationalisation had not come true and stressed that the market would continue to reign supreme in Russia.
"As the situation keeps stabilising, the crisis is being overcome, we intend to systematically and pointedly decrease state interference in the economy," Putin said at an investment forum.
"We have had neither large-scale nationalisation nor sliding into administrative regulation," he added.
Putin stressed that his government’s anti-crisis measures had helped avert the worst-case scenario and said Russia was clawing its way back from its first recession in a decade, a steep slide that sparked memories of the 1998 meltdown.
He said the Russian economy would shrink 8.0 percent or less by the end of the year, a more positive forecast than the government’s earlier prediction of an 8.5 percent decline.
Putin also laid out targets for Russia’s economic development in the coming years, saying that the government aimed to reduce inflation to between 5.0 and 7.0 percent by 2012, from 11 percent forecast for this year.
Meanwhile the budget deficit should be no more than 3.0 percent of gross domestic product by 2012, compared to 8.0 percent now, Putin said.
The outbreak of the global financial crisis led investors to take billions of dollars out of Russia to safer havens, slashing the value of the ruble against the dollar and causing huge losses on Moscow’s stock markets.