Medvedev: Russian economy stable despite concerns over slowdown

Russian economy has been stable despite its stagnated growth, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Wednesday. "Judging by formal criteria, the situation looks quite stable: the economy is growing, although at sluggish pace, the budget has been balanced out, unemployment is moderate, inflation is under control," Medvedev told the Fifth Gaidar Forum here. Meanwhile, Medvedev added that quarterly economic growth in 2010-2012 stood at 4.4 percent, compared to 1.2 percent in second and third quarters of 2013. "There's no denying that the dynamic of our development is alarming," Medvedev admitted. He said the current problems were resulted from successful economic policy of the last decade, not from its mistakes. "That (policy) let our country make a leap forward to a qualitatively new level where we face absolutely different challenges, by nature and by scale," said the prime minister. The slowdown of the Russian economy is due primarily to the structural and institutional constraints that do not allow the country to move to a fundamentally new level of development, he added. In December, in his annual address to the nation, Russian President Vladimir Putin also blamed domestic factors for the country's economic slowdown. The president demanded a balance between industrial growth and environmental protection, and slammed low labor productivity in the country.