Russia’s GDP Rose 4.1% in 2024, and also 4.1% in 2023. America’s Grew 2.45%.
11 February 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
On February 6th, the neoconservative and deeply influential Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center headlined “Is Russia’s Economy Collapsing?” and summarized the opinions of ‘experts’, some of whom were saying yes, and some of whom were saying maybe, and the article closed by quoting two ‘experts’ who “disputed what they described as ‘claims of an imminent catastrophe’ for the Russian economy. ‘In our view, all things being equal, it’s unlikely that the economy will implode soon,’ they write. They have a point.” (That “They have a point” was meaningless mere pretense at having their own opinion, but their actual opinion was already manifestly clear from their selection of ‘experts’ whom they had been quoting, all of whom were parts of the U.S. imperial Establishment, which craves to take over — “regime-change” — Russia. The U.S. regime spends 65% of the entire world’s military costs, and that’s a major reason why it does: throwing all the money they can, in order to ultimately defeat both Russia and China. It’s the mental disease of the people who control the U.S. Government. And it is extremely profitable for them, if, for example, they are investors in the most profitable segment of the U.S. stock market, which is armaments manufacturers.)
On February 7th, Russia itself issued, at the website of President Vladimir Putin, its economic statistics for the entire year of 2024: “Russia’s GDP has increased by 4.1 percent, which is 0.2 percent above the forecast and our expectations. The figure for December was 4.5 percent.”
Also there, was an update on Russia’s 2023 GDP growth-rate; it indicated that the originally reported figure had understated by .5% the growth-rate for 2023 (Russia’s Government has a record of generally revising figures upward; and so the norm is that their initial figures understate how well the economy is performing):
According to the update, our nominal GDP for 2024 is record high at 200 trillion rubles, primarily due to the vigorous growth of manufacturing. Overall, industrial production has grown by 4.6 percent, which is higher than all initial estimates.
Rosstat has also updated its data for the previous three years. According to it, GDP growth in 2023 was 0.5 percent higher than the initial estimate of 3.6 percent. The final figure for 2023 is 4.1 percent. The reason for the update was that we waited for annual financial statements from businesses, final information from economic sectors, and annual financial statements from budget funded enterprises.
The Trading Economics Website continues, as-of now, to show only the old figures.
However, Agence France Presse (AFP), which is the most trustworthy of all U.S.-empire mainstream news-reporting services, issued on February 7th a superb news-report:
“Putin hails Russia's strong 2024 economic growth”
Moscow (AFP) – Russia reported strong economic growth for 2024 on Friday as record spending on the military offensive against Ukraine outweighed the impact of Western sanctions.
Issued on: 07/02/2025 - 13:41
Putin told his prime minister to get a grip on rising consumer prices © Gavriil Grigorov / POOL/AFP
Moscow's massive ramp-up in outlays on soldiers and weapons has helped it defy predictions of a deep recession after it launched its military campaign in February 2022.
But fast growth has triggered high inflation and deep labour shortages at home, worrying the Kremlin.
The economy expanded by 4.1 percent in 2024, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin told Russian President Vladimir Putin in a televised meeting, citing data from the Rosstat statistics agency.
That was the same as the pace of growth in 2023, Mishustin said -- revising up the previous figure of a 3.6 percent expansion for that year.
'Good result'
Putin hailed the economic performance, but ordered Mishustin to get a grip on rising prices.
"Overall, the result is good," Putin said.
"The task for the current year is to reach a more balanced growth trajectory and achieve a reduction in inflation," he said. [The inflation results from a large part of Russia’s work-force having switched to producing weapons, which means lowered production of consumer-goods.]
Mishustin said it was "absolutely clear that the main challenge is inflation", which came in at 9.5 percent last year.
Surging prices for staple goods have become headline news in state media -- usually uncritical of the Kremlin -- in recent months. …
Putin said last year that Moscow is spending almost nine percent of its GDP on defence and security.
Slower growth forecast
Russian officials and economists say the economy is set to slow this year.
A survey of analysts by the central bank published this week showed expectations are for a 1.6 percent expansion in 2025. …
In long-term retrospect, however, no one can reasonably deny that Russia’s rates of economic growth ever since Putin came into power on 1 January 2000 have been far higher than in the U.S. or any of its colonies (‘allies’), though not quite as high as China’s.
The U.S. regime makes much more difficult than the Russian Government does for journalists to find what its GDP growth-rate for 2024 was. They don’t publish that figure, but they do publish each quarter’s figure, and here those were for the year 2024:
Those are the annualized quarterly growth-rates, and they average (throughout the 2024 year) to 2.45% GDP growth-rate over the entire year. If you search online now to find what America’s GDP growth-rate was for the year 2024, you won’t yet find the figure nor how it was computed. But there it is, and you can pass it along to your friends by emailing them the link to this article (which DOES detail how it was computed).
So, the U.S. regime constantly knocks Russia’s economy, which far outperforms America’s.
PS: If you like this article, please email it to all your friends or otherwise let others know about it. None of the U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media will likely publish it (nor link to it, since doing that might also hurt them with Google or etc.). I am not asking for money, but I am asking my readers to spread my articles far and wide, because I specialize in documenting what the Deep State is constantly hiding — what the ‘news’-media ignore if they can, and deny if they must. This is, in fact, today’s samizdat.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
Percentages are extremely misleading and often used to manipulate results. Dollar for dollar or ruble for ruble, the US economy grew much more than the Russian economy.