The Russian finance ministry reported its preliminary estimate of the federal budget deficit for 2020 at RUB4.1tr, or 3.8% GDP, which is smaller than the RUB4.6tr (4.2% of GDP) deficit we anticipated due to better-than-expected revenue collection and...

The Bank of Russia released its first estimateof the foreign debt as of year-end 2020, which gives additional cover to the general balance of payments data we covered earlier. In 2020, the composition of the net private capital outflow from Russia ch...

As expected, the European Central Bank, left all policy instruments unchanged and its official communication was almost a verbatim copy of the December communication. Key in this decision are what the ECB calls “preserving favourable financing condit...

The index rose from 92.2 to 94.1, which was the second consecutive increase. This was mainly driven by higher electricity use and NO2 emissions. That is encouraging from a manufacturing perspective as both indicators relate to industrial activity, to...

Data from the labour market in Poland again surprised on the upside. In December, compared to November, enterprises managed to increase employment by 10k, and the month-on-month growth (0.2%) was more typical for good economic times. During recent mo...

As expected, the Norges Bank did not surprise today. Although the Bank recognises that the stricter lockdown measures are holding the recovery back, the vaccination programme should translate into growth picking up later in the year. Hence, limited n...