The Impact of the Economic Crisis on the Fiscal Stance of Low Income Countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (Report‪)‬

1. INTRODUCTION The economies of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) were among the hardest hit of all economies by the global economic crisis in 2008/09. In real terms, they contracted by an average of 6.6 percent in 2009, a fall of 12.1 percentage points from the growth attained in 2008. (2) The severity of the impact of the crisis on the CIS economies is mainly because the dominant economy in the CIS, that of the Russian Federation, was hit very hard by a combination of the fall in international oil prices and a reversal of international capital flows in 2008, while the other economies in the CIS are highly integrated with the Russian Federation through trade, migrant worker remittances (3) and capital flows (Alturki, Espinosa-Bowen and Ilahi, 2009).