Russia special issue produced by Focus Reports Published by International Business Daily-Mofcom, November

While Sino-Russian trade reached US$ 30 billion in 2005, President Hu and President Putin have set an ambitious target of increasing this figure to US$ 60-80 billion by 2010. Do you believe this target to be realistic?

Interview of the Director of Combined Department for Macroeconomic Forecasts A.N.Klepach "On Russian economy prospects", News Agency "Prime-TASS", 27.10.2006.         

Andrey Nikolaevich, how does the Ministry for Economic Development and Trade assess development of the Russian economy summarizing the results of the first three quarters of the current year?

- In general we assess economic development as being rather good. Economic growth during the first three quarters of 2006 accounted for 6.6% that exceeds our expectations. It is important to note that the growth was supported by increase of investment activities that makes me believe we would not only reach planned forecasted parameters for this year, but GDP growth and investment increase could even slightly exceed the Ministry for Economic Development and Trade forecasts.

On November 19, 2006, G. Gref, Russian Federation Minister of Economic Development and Trade, and S. Schwab, U.S. Trade Representative, signed in Hanoi the Russian-American Protocol that ends negotiations over Russia's accession to the WTO

The USA are the 56th WTO member to complete negotiations with Russia over access to commodity markets, and the 27th WTO member to complete bilateral negotiations over access to services markets.  

It has been a long-awaited event.