Article
The influence of the political regime on property rights in Post-Soviet Russia
Security degree and specification level of property rights are keys for successful economic and social modernization in Russia. In the research, the attempt of evaluating the nature of political influences on evolution of property rights is made. Chronologically research captures the period from 1985 (period of Perestroika) to 2012. According to the author’s claim, such political parameters, as the way of power legitimation, actors’ access to the economic, military and symbolical resources, made major impact on the formation of property rights in Russia.
The book reveals the interconnection between social, cultural and political protest movements and social and economic changes in a post-communist country like Russia still dominated by bureaucratic rulers and "oligarchs" controlling all basic industries and mining activities. Those interests are also dominating Russia’s foreign policy and explain why Russia did not succeed in becoming an integral part of Europe. The latter is, at least, wished by many Russian citizens.
Effective property rights protection plays a fundamental role in promoting economic performance. Yet measurement problems make the relationship between property rights and entrepreneurship an ambiguous issue. As an advancement on previous research in this paper we propose a new approach to the evaluation of the security of property rights based on direct measures that overcomes some limitations of previous studies. We apply this new metrics to a survey of manufacturing firms in Russia to identify the economic effects associated with the lack of property protection in a transition economy. Our analysis supports the view that there is a close relationship between institutions, property rights and economic growth. Our findings confirm that redistributive risks provide a depressing effect on investment and innovative activity of manufacturing enterprises and potentially result in a huge loss in efficiency and economic growth, which in other institutional settings could have been avoided.
A collection of articles on contemprorary Russia by Russian authors; the book is organized in three parts: Part 1: Political Economy, Political Geography and the Politics of Federalism; Part 2: Regime, Ideology, Public Opinion and Legitimacy; Part 3: Civil Society: Defeat and Radicalization?
In the article the necessity of institutional changes on the way to sustainable ecological-economic development and the multidirectional nature of the process is proved. The authors offer the ways of forming effective institutional mechanism. And the features of institutional transformations in Russia are emphasized.
Author reviews Russian legal system based on The Russian Constitution (1993) and also considers functioning of basic political institutions and others associated with them. At the same time author analyses reasons of unsatisfactory functioning of particular institutions from the point of view of the Constitution. In particular, author estimates constitutional status of Russian President and reveals his unproportional impact on other political and even civil societies institutions.
This article is about alternative strategies of constitutional transformation in the period of elaboration of the Russian Constitution of 1993. The author analyses historical origins of basic constitutional principles such as parliament democracy, separation of powers and different forms of government and their interpretation during political crisis of the period under consideration.
The paper examines the structure, governance, and balance sheets of state-controlled banks in Russia, which accounted for over 55 percent of the total assets in the country's banking system in early 2012. The author offers a credible estimate of the size of the country's state banking sector by including banks that are indirectly owned by public organizations. Contrary to some predictions based on the theoretical literature on economic transition, he explains the relatively high profitability and efficiency of Russian state-controlled banks by pointing to their competitive position in such functions as acquisition and disposal of assets on behalf of the government. Also suggested in the paper is a different way of looking at market concentration in Russia (by consolidating the market shares of core state-controlled banks), which produces a picture of a more concentrated market than officially reported. Lastly, one of the author's interesting conclusions is that China provides a better benchmark than the formerly centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe by which to assess the viability of state ownership of banks in Russia and to evaluate the country's banking sector.
The paper examines the principles for the supervision of financial conglomerates proposed by BCBS in the consultative document published in December 2011. Moreover, the article proposes a number of suggestions worked out by the authors within the HSE research team.