An Economic Explanation for Putin’s Recklessness

August 15, 2014
An Economic Explanation for Putin’s Recklessness

Why would Russian President Vladimir Putin push his country into a standoff with the West that is almost certain to hurt its economy? One popular answer is that, as Daniel Drezner put it, Putin “doesn’t care about the same things the West cares about” and is “perfectly happy to sacrifice economic growth for reputation and nationalist glory.”

That may be true. But looking at Russia’s growth trajectory over the past two decades suggests that economic issues may well play a role, just not necessarily in the ways you’d expect.

The Putin Years Chart

As you can see in the chart above, Putin has presided over a run of very strong economic growth. When he took power in 1999, Russians’ per capita income (in dollars, adjusted for purchasing power) had declined for seven of the eight previous years. Since then, it has risen in 14 of 15 years.

That’s not to say Putin was the cause of all this growth. Anders Aslund of the Peterson Institute of International Economics argued in 2008 that the Russian leader, then at the height of his economic success, ”should go down in history as one of the lucky ones who happened to be in the right place at the right time … but accomplished little that was positive.” For the first couple of years, as Aslund tells it, Putin continued the economic reforms that had begun during the Yeltsin era and had started to bear fruit just before Putin took over. He then began reversing those reforms to help his friends and punish his enemies, but rising prices for the huge quantities of oil and natural gas that Russia exports kept driving incomes higher.

Can you really expect ordinary Russians to take all of that into account? No. In general, a country’s citizens can be expected to care mainly about how fast their incomes rise, not how the growth is achieved or how sustainable it is. Economist Ray Fair’s 1978 study of nine decades of presidential election results in the U.S. found that recent economic growth was a pretty good predictor of whether the incumbent party would stay in office — unless war or scandal intervened. Fair’s model has its critics, but it seems reasonable to posit that a decade of rapid income growth (peaking at almost 26% a year in 2006) left Putin with a big reservoir of good will among the Russian people.

As the chart above shows, though, growth has settled into a much lower trend since the Great Recession. Energy prices have been flat, and the inefficient state of the rest of the economy has become a more noticeable drag. GDP growth of only 1.3% in 2013 even led to talk of a “growth crisis” for the Russian economy.

What is Vladimir Putin to do? Boosting the economy would likely require reforms (opening up the energy industry to foreign investors, improving the business climate with a more reliable regulatory and legal climate) that would loosen his grip on power and at best result in a modest growth uptick — especially compared to those crazy leaps of a decade ago. So Putin has gotten his country into a scrap with Ukraine and the West that is probably depressing growth, but has also rallied the country’s people around him. And it’s unlikely to hurt the economy that much, write economists Clifford G. Gaddy and Barry W. Ickes in one of a pair of enlightening recent essays:


That essay focuses on Russia’s likely resilience in the face of sanctions; the other (which I also linked to above in the discussion of Russia’s “growth crisis”) describes the obstacles to significantly faster growth. After reading them one can’t help but conclude that the economy does factor into Putin’s calculations — it’s just, that given his economic options, a Little Cold War may look more attractive to him than peace.
