MOSCOW, March 12. /TASS/. Russian President Vladimir Putin believes that the outflow of capital from the country is insignificant and the authorities have been doing a good job to improve the investment climate.
Speaking in an interview for the TASS project "20 Questions with Vladimir Putin" the head of state said that "not very much money has flowed out of the country, if we bear in mind how much money has flowed into the country."
"The outflow of capital does exist, it is quite evident, but the picture varies from year to year. Generally speaking, it is a natural process - capital inflow and outflow," he remarked.
"The more stable the rules of the game are, the more reliable the protection of investment and property we provide - the more confident investors will feel. The government is obliged to create conditions for investment - this is definitely true. Better conditions must be created for controlling inflation," he stated.
Authorities’ measures bear fruit
Putin emphasized the authorities’ measures to better the conditions for doing business. As an example, he mentioned Russia’s place in the World Bank Group’s ranking Doing Business-2020, where Russia was up to 28th place recently from the second hundred where it had been just several years ago.
"It’s a big improvement, it’s huge," Putin said.
In his opinion "this indicates that the government has been doubling down on its efforts, which are yielding positive results."
He stressed that the volume of investment was growing. "In dollar terms, our investment in the beginning of the 2000s totaled around one billion dollars. Then there were tens of billions. Now direct investment is more than $540 billion."
According to the Bank of Russia, the export of capital from Russia’s private sector in 2019 was down by 57.6% to $26.7 billion. In 2018, the parameter stood at $63 billion.
Episode 12 of the video interview is available at https://putin.tass.ru/en.