Economics
Russia Watchers Seek New Indicators to Gauge Impact of Sanctions
Analysts are prospecting for datasets that will give a real-time read on the economy.
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In a televised address on March 16, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Western powers have subjected his country to an “economic blitzkrieg” of sanctions. But for Russia watchers attempting to get a read on the scale of the damage, there’s not much to go on yet.
At the start of the pandemic, many analysts turned to unconventional indicators such as mobility and traffic-congestion figures provided by the likes of Google and TomTom NV—the Dutch GPS maker—to gauge the economic impact of Covid‑19 in real time. But for Russia they need a new playbook, because these so-called high-frequency datasets aren’t proving as useful.