The State Statistics Committee pleased us with the information that the growth of foreign investment in the Russian economy for the first nine months of 2000 was 22%, and its volume was $7.9 billion. However, at the same time, statistics recorded that our country in the same period officially invested $11.5 billion in the world economy. Mainly in the USA and for a short period.

Against the backdrop of a chronic shortage of investment in Russia, the need for which the Ministry of Economic Development estimates at $100 billion annually, the figures for official investments by Russians abroad are surprising. At least because they are regularly indicated in the official statistical form "1-invest" by Russian enterprises themselves, which is recorded by the State Statistics Committee. Only the banking sector does not fall into the field of view of statisticians.

"This money was not taken out of Russia on purpose," Andrei Konstantinov, deputy head of the State Statistics Committee's Department of Price and Finance Statistics, told Vedomosti. "Basically, this is earned revenue [of enterprises], which is kept in bank deposits until it is returned to Russia. Enterprises provide this data themselves. The indicator is called 'bank deposits' and refers to funds that remain in accounts abroad."

Direct investments from Russia amount to only $276 million (mainly to Iran), 83% of the total investments abroad are so-called other investments. This formulation hides $1.6 billion in commodity loans and $9.6 billion in bank deposits. "This is not a hidden capital flight, its flight is assessed according to the line item "omissions and errors" of the balance of payments and can only be indirectly assessed," Alexander Astapovich, head of the private financial sector analysis department at the Bureau of Economic Analysis, told Vedomosti. "It's just that a large sum of [Russian] money is constantly outside the country on statistically assessable grounds."

In the constantly improving system of currency control in Russia, there are enough restrictions on the legal presence of domestic capital abroad, and, despite this, disciplined taxpayers themselves submit information to the State Statistics Committee on investments abroad.

"If companies want to keep their funds abroad in their own account, they must have a Central Bank license to open such an account, otherwise these operations are possible only through an authorized bank that has a Central Bank license," Elena Matrosova, director of the macroeconomic research center at the Unicon company, told Vedomosti. There has been no recent surge in requests to the Central Bank regarding the export of capital from the country. "We are talking about balances in accounts in authorized banks," one of the heads of a systemically important bank that carries out foreign economic activity told Vedomosti. "These operations are possible because the Russian banking system has not yet been integrated into international banking accounting. What we call a deposit is considered an investment abroad." As a result, money is accounted for twice. For the bank, these are balances on a correspondent account abroad, and for the exporting enterprise, they are a completely legal short-term investment, which the bank can use at its direction for three months, allotted for the return of foreign currency earnings to the country. Considering that this flow is of a permanent nature, statistics record a solid and legal turnover of Russian funds abroad.

According to a Vedomosti source, this money is not in a correspondent account in an American bank. "In a normal economic situation in Russia, this money could work for our economy for an extra three months," says a Vedomosti source. "There is no vacuum in nature. If they do not work in Russia, then they work outside of it, including to pay for contracts for importing goods into our country. And then everyone is surprised how importers manage to show either too high or too low a price, depending on the need. All this is done with legal, white money."

It is no coincidence that the largest investments from the "other" section were made by Russian enterprises in the US ($9.3 billion out of $11.2 billion). "If you are interested in keeping funds in dollars or making payments in them, then, naturally, they will be in the US," says Astapovich. "In addition, the dollar today looks preferable to any other currency."

Our investments in America are $9.3 billion