The Economic Cost of Russian Statism

September 21, 2023 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty

Russia’s government has been appropriately criticized for invading Ukraine, but let’s focus today on Putin’s economic mismanagement.

I’m motivated by this tweet from a professor at the University of Chicago. He points out that Russians were richer than other parts of the Soviet Empire when communism collapsed (thank you, Ronald Reagan).

But now they are poorer.

The professor notes that Putin “failed economic development.”

I want to build upon that observation with some data.

Just yesterday, I wrote about the latest issue of Economic Freedom of the World. So let’s now modify Professor Sonin’s chart by looking in that document to see the the economic liberty rankings for all the countries in the chart.

Here are those scores on the right.

As you can see, Russia has the least amount of economic freedom of all the nations in the chart. And by a big margin (red nations are in the top quartile, blue nations in the second quartile, and Russia is the only one in the third quartile).

So Russia can be added to our anti-convergence club.