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MOSCOW, April 22 (Reuters) - Russian consumer confidence in the last six months suffered the worst slump ever recorded in a five-year-old index as people worried about jobs with the onset of recession, a survey showed on Wednesday.
Russia's reading in the Nielsen Global Consumer Confidence Index fell to 75 points, the lowest since its 2004 inception and leaving it two points below the global average. That marks a sharp retreat from September, when Russia ranked among the 10 most optimistic countries [ID:nLN376150].
Russia took the biggest hit with an unprecedented fall of 29 index points, the single largest decline ever recorded in the Nielsen global survey," the market research firm said.
Fellow emerging markets Brazil and United Arab Emirates saw the next sharpest falls in confidence of 21 points each.
The release comes in a week when official data showed 1.8 million Russians lost their jobs in the first three months of 2009. [ID:nLK123156]
"Continued depressed oil prices, devaluation of the currency and local slowdown has taken hold in many sectors and has brought back memories of the Russian crisis of 1998," said Dwight Watson, Nielsen's managing director in Russia. Nearly a third of Russians described their job prospects over the next 12 months as "bad", and 43 percent reckon Russia is in a recession which will not recede within the next year. (Reporting by Toni Vorobyova; editing by Stephen Nisbet)