Economy 4 min read By Callum Montgomery
Russia’s resource wealth is vast. Turning it into broad prosperity is the harder part
Russia has enormous energy, mineral and forest assets, yet 2024 regional data show Moscow’s per-capita income was more than four times Tuva’s.
Russia’s balance sheet begins with scale. The World Bank puts its 2025 economy at roughly $2.56 trillion in current dollars and its population at 143.5 million. Beneath that economy sits one of the largest concentrations of natural capital on earth.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates proved oil reserves of 58 billion barrels at the start of 2024 and proved natural-gas reserves of 1,559 trillion cubic feet in 2023. Russia produced about 9.2 million barrels of crude a day in 2024 and 23.2 Tcf of dry gas. The USGS says Russia supplied 41% of global palladium output in 2024, 30% of gem-quality natural diamonds and 21% of potash. FAO’s 2020 forest assessment put Russian forest area at about 815 million hectares, roughly one fifth of the world total.
The striking economic question is why this asset base produces such different household outcomes across the map. Rosstat’s 2024 figures put average monthly per-capita money income at 63,959 rubles nationwide. Moscow recorded 143,171 rubles. Tuva recorded 33,541.6 rubles, with a median of 26,264.2. Moscow’s average was therefore about 4.27 times Tuva’s.
Poverty data point in the same direction. The revised national figure for 2024 was 7.1%. Tuva’s regional figure was 20.4%. Those numbers do not mean everywhere outside Moscow is poor. Russia has wealthy industrial cities and resource regions, some with high nominal wages. They do show that national aggregates conceal unusually large spatial differences.
Geography is central to the economics. The Far Eastern Federal District accounts for 40.6% of Russia’s territory but only 5.38% of its population. This makes roads, utilities, healthcare, education and logistics expensive to provide at metropolitan standards. A commodity deposit can be enormously valuable while the settlements around it remain costly to connect and service.
The World Bank’s work on Russia’s spatial disparities identifies exactly this combination: inland population dispersion, distance from large markets, the legacy of planned industrial geography and the location of resource extraction. Its analysis of regional potential emphasises economic density, urbanisation, connectivity and skills rather than resource endowment alone.
That distinction matters for investors and policymakers. Resource wealth can support exports and public revenue, but productivity growth depends on what sits around extraction: transport links, competitive suppliers, human capital, housing, digital networks and institutions capable of allocating capital well. Russia’s undeveloped potential is therefore less a story of untouched riches than of the very high cost of converting remote assets into a diversified economy.
The country has already proved it can extract at global scale. The more difficult test is whether the returns from that extraction can narrow rather than preserve the economic distance between its most prosperous urban centres and its least advantaged regions.
