Since the beginning of July, the citizens of the Russian Federation are able to receive any banking services remotely upon submission of their biometric data, which will be stored in the Unified Biometrics System.
The experts from the Economist Intelligence Unit are pointing out that the population of Central and Southeast Europe will decrease by nearly 34 million people over the next 33 years.
Following the memorable changeover in the presidency of Russia in 2012, when Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev simply swapped places, a new plan of national development was formulated for Putin's next term in office.
The Russian government tries to stay away from cooperating with western technological companies and opens the door for Chinese internet giants like Alibaba to help modernize Russia’s ecommerce market.
Russia, the world’s biggest oil producer, has been gradually redirecting its oil exports from Europe to the increasingly more promising Chinese market, as China became the largest oil importer in the world.
After a period of decline, the RUB in the beginning of 2018 to hit RUB56/USD and RUB70/EUR as oil prices passed the USD65 per barrel mark, making the Russian currency one of the best performing in the world this year.
On June 4th, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a counter-sanctions legislation titled “On measures of influence (counteraction) on unfriendly actions of the United States of America and (or) other foreign states”.
St. Petersburg, although is the second biggest city in Russia, is still lagging behind not only most of the European metropolises, but also its more immediate competitor – Moscow.
Sanctions imposed on Russia so far have cost Russia a loss of annual GDP growth of 1-1.5 percentage points. New sanctions may lead to further losses reaching 0.7-0.8 percentage points.
The volume and value of M&A deals targeting companies in Central and Southeast Europe in Q1’18 fell to 1,823, valued at USD24,789m, after deal making failed to sustain the growth recorded in Q4’17, when 2,253 deals worth USD38,932m were noted.