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by hurin 4140 days ago
No surprise with Russia topping the list. Since 1990 the country's entire economic output has been exploiting what's left of soviet infrastructure and selling natural resources.
1 comments

Any countries with totally new economies in the last 25 years?

China comes to mind, along with other east asia. But it's natural to exploit what you've already got.

And most of Russia's non-military industries turned out not competitive.

Well non-competitive isn't quite correct. Certain industries indeed were non-competitive (i.e. automotive, which btw boomed domestically post 1990), but as a whole they were torn apart by privatization and corruption.

One reason being that the way these business and industries transferred into private holdings was always somewhat dubious (and hence the very real risk of losing these holdings with the next change in political winds e.g. Khodorkovsky). Anyone that got their hands on a piece of the soviet-pie tried to get as much out of it putting as little as possible into it.