The Service has altered the basic indicators used to draw predictions and assess the results: now, among them are government spending, investments in industry, consumer spending, and export to import index.

Such a larger survey of components, officials said, provide them with more information and, as a result, produce a more concise understanding.

“The process of data processing is very complex,” Professor Konstantin Sonin from the New Economic School told RT. “Revising the data back and forth is the necessary part of it. Now the forecasts will be more accurate, and this is good.”

Unfortunately, the Finance Ministry also had a range of bad news: Minister Aleksey Kudrin said that the surging prices for food, worsened by summer droughts and wildfires, could have a knock-on effect on non-food items.

He added that although the inflation rates were expected to be at around 6-7 per cent, in fact they amounted to 7-8 per cent.

Professor Sonin, however, believes that inflation has nothing to do with droughts.

“The draught and crop shortages will have a negligible impact on the index of consumer prices and on inflation,” Professor Sonin said. “The inflation is primarily and almost always driven by monetary factors, Central Bank policy, and by the revenues and expenditures of the state budget.”