Experts: Crisis in Belarus hasn’t started yet. It’s all is still to come

A structural crisis of overproduction is taking place in the country now. Belarus is facing the recession in product demand; export has decreased by 48%, while the GDP is not growing at all.

The official estimations of the crisis influence on the Belarusian economy have always been optimistic. As Mikalai Zaichanka, Economy Minister, said last year, the global financial crisis has influenced the Belarusian economy indirectly, as "our economy is an open one". Then the deputy foreign minister Andrei Eudachenka expressed an opinion "I think that the financial crisis we observe in the world today is to come to an end soon. By that time we are to create a basis for receiving foreign currency for development of our economy".

However the head of the analytical centre "Strategy" Leanid Zaika holds a different opinion. "Earlier I also said that the year 2010 is a turning point of the crisis, but I have an impression that the crisis hasn’t started yet. The crisis is a global phenomenon, when reshaping of the structure of production, reorientation, landslide of prices are taking place, and the global economy is restructured. It is like a disease. But the efforts of Obama, Putin and Sarkozy have softened the disease, the inflammation hasn’t been cured, but there has been no effect on the symptoms," Leanid Zaika said in an interview to "Ezhednevnik".

"The country with a backward economic structure has met with a recession in product demand. The export has fallen by 48%, and the GDP is not growing at all. At the same time, in the leading countries of the West the export has been reduced by 8-12%. "The Belarusian wonder" meant production of a huge number of mincing machines, tractors and cars. But only a half of them were needed. We have been tested by foreign markets. It was a test for the Belarusian economy," Zaika believes.

And during this test, as said by him, the government does not inform that Belarusian goods have become cheaper by 32% abroad, while they have become by 15% more expensive in Belarus. And the economy is trying to survive due to this gap.

As a result of a real crisis, Zaika believes, substandard shoes won’t be manufactured any more, enterprises which produce poor quality furniture would be closed; plants that make unneeded industrial machines are to be stopped. "Crisis means disposing of outdated process units," the economist said.