Endowed with a wealth of natural resources and a marketplace of 150m people, the Russian Federation has all the economic potential to rival its military might during the Cold War period. With some estimates of the cost of moving from a centrally planned Communist economy to a free market capitalist one running as high as $400bn over the next 30 years the country will also be the source of the bulk of the debt funding from central and eastern Europe over the coming decades.
September 01, 1997