General Character: Extremely centralized. Government efforts to privatize and establish market economy weak.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP): In 1992 about US$30.3 billion; real growth rate -10 percent. Agriculture accounted for 23 percent of GDP, industry for 38 percent, and other sectors for 39 percent.
Agriculture: Mainly state and collective farms; sprinkling of small plots for private household use. Primary crops: fodder, potatoes, wheat, barley, oats, buckwheat, potatoes, flax, and sugar beets. Cattle, hogs, and sheep raised.
Industry: Machine- and instrument-building (especially tractors, large trucks, machine tools, and automation equipment), petrochemicals, plastics, synthetic fibers, fertilizer, processed food, glass, and textiles.
Minerals: Small deposits of iron ore, nonferrous metal ores, dolomite, potash, rock salt, phosphorites, refractory clay, molding sand, sand for glass production, and various building materials.
Energy: Primary energy sources: twenty-two thermal power plants (total capacity 7,033 megawatts), additional small power plants (total capacity 188 megawatts), and nine small hydroelectric power plants (total capacity six megawatts). Country's power grid connected to grids of Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. Almost totally dependent on Russia for all oil, coal, and natural gas needed to fuel electric-power generation plants.
Foreign Trade: In 1994 about 84 percent of foreign trade conducted with other members of Commonwealth of Independent States. Imports: natural gas, oil and gas condensate, diesel fuel, mazut, wheat, corn, and sugar. Exports: crude and processed oil, heavy machinery, diesel fuel, mazut, chemical and mineral fertilizers, televisions, trucks, tractors, refrigerators and freezers, meat, and milk.
Fiscal Year: Calendar year.
Exchange Rate: In March 1995, 11,669 rubles per US$1.
Data as of June 1995