In this note, we review recent data concerning Russia's economic integration with other countries. We first analyze the general picture of Russia's economic integration with the rest of the world and the importance of foreign economic relations for the country. We then turn to China, an increasingly significant economic partner for Russia. The European Union remains Russia's most important trading partner and is by far the most important source of foreign direct investment to Russia as well as source of other financing. China's importance to Russia has also increased, especially with respect to merchandise trade.

In this paper we assess the rationality and goodness-of-fit of macroeconomic forecasts for 21 large emerging market countries during the past two decades. We find that in some countries forecasts have not been rational in the sense that they seem to have a systematic bias. We also find that for both GDP growth and inflation the forecast errors are larger for more volatile economies. For some countries GDP and inflation forecast errors have positive correlation, which is consistent with New Keynesian macromodels, whereas for other countries this is not the case. Our results suggest that relying on any one forecast methodology is not prudent.