Investment and Saving in Russian Macroeconomy : Construction and Analyses of an Aggregated Sam for Russian 1995

Assessing investment activity is a key to understanding the present Russian economy; the Russian official national accounts, however, do not give very much information on it because of their large statistical discrepancies. Using a matrix balancing method, we construct an aggregated Social Accounting Matrix (SAM), which integrates a Russian Flow of Funds table into the Russian national accounts and contains no discrepancies. Comparing the Russian SAM with Japanese and US SAMs, we find some characteristics of the Russian economy such as: a large current deficit in the non-financial corporation sector, different tax burdens for the institutional sectors, a low level of financial intermediation, and wage arrears as a kind of forced saving