Dramatic drop in cross-border trade
Trade between Russia and its Nordic neighbors in 2009 dropped dramatically, figures from the Russian Customs Service show.
According to the figures, Russian-Finnish trade dropped from a turnover of 22.38 billion USD in 2008 to 13.11 billion USD in 2009. Exports and imports suffered equally. While Russia exported goods worth 15.7 billion USD to Finland in 2008, the exports had dropped to 9.1 billion USD in 2009. Imports were down from 6.6 billion USD to 3.9 billion USD, the figures say.
Trade relations with Sweden and Norway declined similarly. While trade turnover with Sweden totaled 8.65 billion USD in 2008, the trade had shrunk to 5.2 billion USD in 2009. Trade with Norway declined from 2.3 billion USD in 2008 to 1.8 billion USD in 2009, the trade survey from the Customs Service show.
However, there are signs of improvement. Trade figures from January 2010 indicate that cross-border economic cooperation is again picking pace. Thus, both Finland and Norway boosted trade turnover with Russia from respectively 861,6 billion USD and 86,6 billion USD to 1208,4 and 113,3 billion USD, the report reads. Russian trade with Sweden however in the period continued to decline.
2009 was a bad year also for most Russian regions’ international trade. As stated in the latest Barents Monitoring report, foreign trade turnover in a region like Murmansk Oblast in 2009 declined 38 percent compared with 2008 figures. The region in 2009 had a foreign trade turnover of two billion USD.
