Russia has failed to adapt to economic and technological change and has fallen into the ranks of "downshifter" countries that will catastrophically lag behind their more advanced rivals, the chief executive officer of Russia's top lender Sberbank German Gref said on January 15 at the Gaidar Forum in Moscow.
Russia has failed to adapt to economic and technological change and has fallen into the ranks of "downshifter" countries that will catastrophically lag behind their more advanced rivals, the chief executive officer of Russia's top lender Sberbank German Gref said on January 15 at the Gaidar Forum in Moscow.
"We must honestly admit that we have lost to competitors," he stressed. "We have found ourselves in the ranks of countries that are losing, downshifter counties."
Gref — head of Sberbank and a former economic development minister under President Vladimir Putin — said the era of oil was over and that in the new technology-driven world the difference between the leaders and losers would be "larger than during the industrial revolution," according to the Rambler news service.
The Moscow Times reports that Gref called for radical overhaul of state institutions and the education system to enable people to join the technical revolution.
