Revised balance of payments statistics shed some light on recent FX trends and budget revenues

RUSSIA ECONOMICS - In Brief 13 Mar 2025 by Evgeny Gavrilenkov
The Central Bank just published its flash estimate of the key constituencies of the balance of payments for 2M25 and revised data for 4Q24. The revisions appeared quite significant, and the CBR referred to some updated foreign trade statistics it recently collected. We recently mentioned on several occasions that the importance of national currencies and other means of payments for settling foreign trade contracts grew steadily last year, and this trend might continue this year. This evolution could have been one of the factors that helped to appreciate the ruble in recent months. It looks as though the revised balance of payments data stemmed from this change and the additional time the CBR required to account for these changes more accurately. The regulator explained these revisions with fresh information on exports (and, to some extent, imports). The table below shows the revised current account balance and the trade balance - along with data published a month ago. As one can see, instead of having negative current account balances in December 2024 and January 2025, Russia now enjoys quite positive numbers, which is very common. Overall, the 4Q24 statistics changed significantly. Given that in February 2025, the current account widened massively compared to January, this could offer an additional explanation about the most recent appreciation of the ruble. The revised foreign trade and the balance of payments statistics will help to update our 2025 macroeconomic forecast.Meanwhile, the Ministry of Finance recently published the federal budget execution statistics for 2M25, and it illustrated that the revenue flow was weak amid the appreciated ruble. In 2M25, the Min...

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