ABSTRACT
There is no such thing as a typical emerging economy, but Russia is more atypical than most. It is on the richer end of the scale of emerging economies: the International Monetary Fund (IMF) puts its 2011 per capita gross domestic product (GDP) in international dollars at $16,736 (at purchasing power parity—PPP). 1 That is more than twice the level of the People’s Republic of China and more than four times that of India. In addition, Russia has already industrialized once and has had a few decades as a superpower. To say it is ‘emerging’ begs a great many questions. It is an upper-middle-income country with many of the attributes of modernity but with deep-seated economic problems, as well.
