alia, from the restricted access of russian banks and companies to external markets. in order to normalise the situation with foreign exchange liquidity, the bank of russia has introduced reverse transactions to provide it. interest rates on these transactions have been decreased to the level of libor rates plus 0. 5 pp. the volume of foreign exchange liquidity provision is determined by the demand estimates based on the balance of payments forecast. the next one - year repo auction of 15 december will accept eurobonds and provide for the possibility of early deal termination by borrowers. in the near future the bank of russia also intends to consider the introduction of foreign exchange lending secured by non - marketable assets. foreign exchange loans, extended by banks to companies with stable income in foreign currency, are supposed to be eligible as collateral. bank of russia forecast the current situation requires updating the forecasts and adjusting the policy to ensure financial and price stability enabling the economy to adjust to the new conditions and start developing as quickly as possible. the “ guidelines for the single state monetary policy in 2015 and for 2016 and 2017 ” stipulate that the removal of sanctions and trade restrictions results in certain inflation decrease and moderate acceleration of economic growth. we take this possibility into account but base our policy decisions on the forecasts providing for long - term sanctions. the baseline forecast the bank of russia currently applies in the decision - making approximates scenario iiib published in the aforementioned document. we expect average oil prices to be $ 80 per barrel during the next three years. this average price results from consensus forecast of the leading analysts. bis central bankers ’ speeches in the scenario under consideration the current account surplus remains on the acceptable level of $ 56 billion in 2015. in 2016 and 2017, no significant changes in the current account balance are expected either. the development of import substitution will boost domestic production. the service sector will see similar trend. conditions for diversification of the economy will be established. contribution of net exports to gdp will be positive. according to the bank of russia estimates, in these conditions economic growth rates will remain close to zero in 2015 – 2016, however in 2017, when import substitution and increase in non - commodity exports become more apparent, we expect gdp to grow up to 1 – 1. 2 %. higher growth rates in the next three years require structural reforms, primarily measures aimed at real improvement of business climate and higher labour productivity. the inflation level is currently affected by the actual ruble depreciation and the imposed

a second possibility is that globalization has restrained unit labor costs by raising productivity. increasing volumes of trade should bolster productivity as economies concentrate their resources in those sectors in which they are relatively more efficient. but i have seen little direct evidence on the extent to which globalization may have boosted aggregate productivity growth in the united states in recent years. nevertheless, research at the board finds that multinational corporations, which may have the greater opportunities to realize efficiencies by shifting production locations, accounted for a disproportionate share of aggregate productivity growth in the late 1990s. 11 and some microeconomic studies have found a relationship between global engagement and productivity at the firm level. 12 thus, it seems possible that the persistently high growth rates of multifactor productivity in recent years may partly be due to the productivity - enhancing effects of globalization. in this regard, i would note that a potential shortcoming of my approach to assessing the effects of globalization on inflation is that these effects may be too recent to be captured adequately by the data. that is, it may be too soon for globalization to have generated statistically observable changes in the parameter estimates or structure of the standard inflation model. nonetheless, if the influence of globalization on inflation is as substantial as many claim, we might have expected the standard model to have had difficulty in predicting recent inflation trends. for example, if recent increases in world labor supply are restraining domestic unit labor costs to a significant degree or if there are other important influences on inflation that are related to globalization but difficult to quantify in the context of the standard model, we would expect to have seen sizable model errors over the past several years. again, the evidence points to some limited influence of globalization on u. s. inflation. if we use out - ofsample dynamic simulations of a model for core pce price inflation estimated from 1985 through the end of 2001, we find that, although the model overpredicts inflation over the past several years, the errors average only 0. 1 to 0. 2 percentage point per year, considerably less than one might have expected given the anecdotes in the popular press. in contrast, the forecast errors from a model of core cpi inflation are larger ( averaging roughly 1 / 2 to 1 percentage point per year since mid - 2001 ), perhaps suggestive of some influence from globalization. what do i conclude from all of this evidence? my own assessment is that, quite naturally, the greater integration of the u. s.