MOSCOW, August 7 The Russian economy passed the peak of overheating in the first quarter of this year, when its growth was 5.4%, and in the second it slowed to 4.8%, former Russian Finance Minister and economist Mikhail Zadornov said in an interview.
The head of the Central Bank, Elvira Nabiullina, said at the end of July that the scale of overheating of the Russian economy in the first half of the year reached its maximum in the last 16 years; it was higher only before the 2008 crisis. Earlier in an interview with the agency, Zadornov noted that overheating was primarily caused by a simultaneous lack of labor resources and free production capacity, which limited the potential growth of domestic production. 
< br />«This overheating began in mid-2023 and, apparently, the first quarter of 2024 was the peak, the growth rates show this,» he said.
According to Zadornov's estimate, the economic growth rate in the second quarter slowed to 4.8% from 5.4% in the first quarter, and amounted to approximately 5% at the end of the first half of the year.
According to Rosstat, Russia's GDP growth in the first quarter accelerated to 5.4% year-on-year from 4.9% in the fourth quarter of last year. According to the Ministry of Economic Development, GDP growth slowed to 4% in the second quarter. But the Central Bank has a more positive estimate — 4.4%, while in the third quarter the regulator expects economic growth to slow down to 3.2%.
Read the full text of the interview on the ria.ru website on August 9 at 10:00 Moscow time.