Estimating GDP and foreign rents of the oil and gas sector in the USSR then and Russia now

Abstract

A Soviet legacy for present-day Russia is found in its resource dependency as well as its implicit exposition of resource rents from foreign trade in the national accounting. Estimating rents from the foreign trade of oil and gas, we demonstrate how large the GDP of the oil and gas sector had been in the Soviet Union and has been in present-day Russia, as well.