E-bulletin of IISEPS Center for Documentation, No. 8, 2017 – ISSN 1822-5578
(only Russian)
Content
Introduction
1. Basic trends of August
2. Chronicle of key events
3. Politics
3.1. Up to 70% profitability
3.2. Questions with no answers
4. Economics
4.1. Anti-Robin Hoods
4.2. Slightly positive dynamics
4.3. What and whom does the economic growth owes?
5. Finances
5.1. Economics of overdue debts
6. Our forecast for September
7. From the IISEPS desktop
Introduction:
Dear readers
Our forecast regarding the weakening of the Belarusian ruble didn’t come true again. During the first decade of August events in the exchange market were going in the direction we expected. US dollar started from 1.9335 rubles and reached 1.9526 rubles by August 9 (-1%). But then financial gods changed their minds; at the end of month the forces of nature in the form of the hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico were against us. The hurricane damaged oil industry; as a result, the price of oil went up, and it made the Russian ruble stronger. By consequence, the Belarusian ruble became stronger too.
During a meeting with the administration on the 23rd of June Alexander Lukashenko promised to set the records straight and determine when all problems in the sphere of education would be resolved. In our forecast we doubted that the head of state would keep his word. The result? On the 24th of August we witnessed Republican Pedagogic Council. It rather reminded us of a show than of a real working meeting where participants are interested in solving actual problems. A lot of banalities were proclaimed: it is more and more difficult for a modern man to find their place in the world, to understand real values, and not to lose themselves in the stream of information; these processes lead to the domination of education. As for concrete deadlines, they were determined only for the issuing new handbooks…
Simultaneously with the promise to set the records straight in education, Lukashenko promised to approve the document on the emancipation of business initiative. The document was already examined by the government at the time. However, such an important stage of approval did not guarantee that the document would finally be available in August, and we mentioned that in our forecast. After our forecast was released, the final deadline was declared – the 1st of October. Well, business waited for that for over 20 years, they can wait for another month, can’t they?
As we expected, August did not become a vacation month for those who are worried about the negative prospects of the joint Belarus-Russian military exercise “The West-2017”. After “Crimeaisours” and military actions in Donetsk and Luhansk regions of Ukraine, one can expect any surprises from Russia. Forewarned is forearmed, and following this principle, Edgars Rinkēvičs, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Latvia, in an interview with the LNT program “900 seconds” warned about possible provocations that could be preceded by “accidents”. To avoid an escalation “into a large-scale crisis”, the US transferred additional fighter planes to Lithuania. There are more examples like this.
IISEPS board