This year, the American magazine Forbes did a research on the economic situation in Russia’s thirty most populated cities (excluding Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and the cities located in the North Caucasus). The cities were ranked in accordance with their final score that depended on six indicator groups: business climate, the population’s spending power, stability during a recession, social characteristics, infrastructure, and the ease of doing business for the companies’ owners and top managers.

Among the Top 10 best business cities were Krasnodar, Khabarovsk, Yekaterinburg, Chelyabinsk, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Sochi, and Krasnoyarsk.

Forbes’ experts believe that since the first rating’s appearing two years before, Russia has changed considerably. This is particularly true of business and big cities, they say.

‘Growing unemployment rates, decreased tax payments, and shrinking construction outputs are the problems most Russian cities have had to face in a post-recession country,’ the magazine states.

The magazine’s analysts explain that the recession has been the least traumatic not only for the raw material capitals and for the cities with large-scale investment projects but also for the places that could boast a diversified economy and non-protectionist authorities even before the crisis kicked in.