Impending Recession and How to Fight It: Empirical Analysis of Russian Reality and Global Experience

The paper considers the problem of autonomous recessions in the Russian economy, which are explained as a drop of the output caused by endogenous shocks of the supply and/or demand. In order to determine possible factors of the autonomous recession we consider the stylized facts and other characteristics of such recessions in OECD economies in 2000—2012. Using these findings we study the current state of the Russian economy in terms of factors of a possible recession. We also examine the countercyclical policy of the government. The latter is done using different approaches of calculation of the output gap, including the determination of the levels of factor utilization that don’t accelerate the inflation rate. These results are used to make a conclusion about the optimal design of the countercyclical policy that reflects the characteristics of the recession and the output gap as well as the key features of Russia as a resource-based economy.