Article
Нерешенный вопрос легитимности частной собственности в России
Private property exists in Russia for almost 25 years. However, the legitimacy of established property rights and the legitimacy of private property as an institution remain ambiguous. Despite the change of generations and the improvement of living standards, numerous opinion polls show that the majority of Russians refers negatively not only to the privatization of the 1990s and its results, but also to private property in general. Positive forecasts on the adaptation of people to new reality do not come true. The authors analyze the reasons and consequences of private property illegitimacy and compare alternative ways of its legitimating. The main conclusion is the uselessness of any discretionary state intervention in this long-lasting process, while the focus should be put on the mitigation of inequality and the enforcement of formal institutions without any exceptions or privileges.
The results of the State Duma election and the public reaction to it revealed a quali tatively new political situation. New social forces entered the political arena. The period between parliamentary and presidential elections will be a period of re-fl ection of this situation and practical conclusions for both the government and the society. The main task of Russian society is to ensure a second round of the presidential election with an unpredictable ending.
The legitimacy of NATO’s war against Serbia in March 1999 has been widely debated. In the previous chapter, Carl Ceulemans concludes that justice is on the side of NATO’s military campaign. But his analysis is not the only one possible within the framework of Just War Theory. In the following, a different analysis is presented. It shows that while operating within the framework of Just War Theory one can arrive at quite different conclusions from his.
This book sheds new light on the continuing debate within political thought as to what constitutes power, and what distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate power. This book concludes by arguing that the Russian experience provides a useful lens through which ideas of power and legitimacy can be re-evaluated and re-interpreted, and through which the idea of “the West” as the ideal model can be questioned.
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.