2011-02-18 17:33

MOSCOW - Foreign direct investment (FDI) in Russia slid significantly last year, Russian Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin said Friday.

At an economic forum in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk, the minister said preliminary figures indicated FDI had fallen by 50 percent to about $12 to $14 billion.

"This (FDI) is not enough. In the best years, it reached $27 billion," Kudrin was quoted by local media as saying.

Kudrin also said Russia's industry and its gross domestic product (GDP) could rebound to the pre-global economic crisis level by the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012.

"We hope we will reach the pre-crisis level. On the GDP front, we will reach the pre-2008 economy size at the beginning of next year," he told the forum.

The minister said Russia's GDP needed annual growth of 6-7 percent.

"We will see in the coming years a stable growth of around 4 percent and above. However, for Russia, the level of a mid-ranking economy is insufficient," Kudrin said.

"We need a significantly higher growth rate of 6-7 percent," he said.

At the end of January, the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat) said Russia's GDP grew by 4 percent in 2010, higher than the latest 3.8-percent forecast.

In 2009, the Russian economy, smashed by the global economic crisis, saw its worst recession in decades, with GDP shrinking 7.9 percent.