Russia is overhauling its approach to crafting the budget next year to safeguard reserves, highlighting the challenges it faces in steering the recession-hit economy through a downturn in oil prices. Russia used 900 billion rubles ($13 billion) in the first eight months from the Reserve Fund, one of its two sovereign wealth funds, to cover the deficit, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said Wednesday at a government meeting in Moscow. The non-oil shortfall, the gap excluding revenue from the energy industry, was 11 percent of economic output in the first half, the widest in 10 years, according to Siluanov. To temper the effects of the unfolding crisis on public finances, the government is suspending the so-called budget rule in 2016, a week after announcing plans to drop three-year fiscal plans in favor of a one-year program. The rule, which went into effect in 2013 and sought to cap public spending […]