ABSTRACT
For assessing the prospects of post-Yeltsin Russia, there is some point in examining Russia as Putin inherited it, and comparing it both to what Yeltsin inherited from the Soviet Union, and to high-income countries the Soviet Union aspired to compete with and Russia aspires to join. There are, of course, problems with any such comparisons. Countries do not always use identical definitions, data may be unreliable because of faulty collection methods, falsification, or the existence of a large 'black' economy, or may refer to different years. However, if attention is concentrated on data where Russia differs greatly from the countries with which it is compared, a large number of indicators are used, covering a wide range of fields, the impact on the overall picture of shortcomings in individual indicators is reduced. As far as possible those principles have been adopted in what follows. Groups of indicators have been tabulated under living standards, the economy, industry, agriculture, transport, construction, capital investment, energy efficiency, pollution, reserves, and international trade. In many cases numbers have been rounded to the nearest integer or one place of decimals, as use of figures to two or more places of decimals can convey an impression of greater precision than is actually the case. Some tables use Gross Domestic Product (GDP), others Gross National Product (GNP). However, no table mixes the two, and the differences found are far larger than the differences between GDP and GNP.
