Economy contracted 3.8% in fourth quarter after drop of 3.7% Russia’s economy shrank less than forecast in the fourth quarter, using a flexible exchange rate to ride out the collapse in oil prices. Gross domestic product fell 3.8 percent from a year earlier after a revised 3.7 percent drop in the previous three months, the Federal Statistics Service said Friday. The median estimate of 13 analysts surveyed by Bloomberg was for a 3.9 percent decline. Contractions in the first and second quarters of 2015 were revised to 2.8 percent and 4.5 percent from 2.2 percent and 4.6 percent, leaving the full-year decline unchanged at 3.7 percent. There’s “evidence that the economy is going through a continuous adjustment to ‘the new normal’: the low oil price, a free-floating ruble and geopolitical uncertainty fed by sanctions,” Vladimir Miklashevsky, a strategist at Danske Bank A/S in Helsinki, said before the data release. […]