Article
Незащищенность прав собственности и ее экономические последствия: российский опыт
The article analyses the debates among the South African establishment on the Land issue and a possible amendment to the Constitution which would enable the government to expropriate land without any financial compensation. It is crucial to note that the Land reform is currently high on the agenda of the South African society, to say the least. Debates on the expropriation of land without compensation were resumed in the country shortly after December 2017 when ANC announced its readiness to reconsider article 25 of the Constitution, the article which stipulates property rights for land. Whereas there is a common understanding in South Africa that the land issue is to be addressed as soon as possible, opinions on how to achieve this goal differ significantly. Proceeding from their field research conducted in South Africa, the authors analyze the stand of the modern church organizations and social movements on the Land reform. The question hanging in the air is whether it is acceptable to expropriate land in order to fix the housing crisis in the South African megalopolises. Also, the article attempts to consider the Land reform as a possible solution to the housing crisis in South Africa. All things considered, the Land reform is a multifaceted issue with too many stakeholders, including government and different social, traditional and religious groups. In a nutshell, the Land reform is a Catch 22 situation where any move could be fraught with serious repercussions.
Secure property rights are central to economic development and stable government, yet difficult to create. Relying on surveys in Russia from 2000 to 2012, Timothy Frye examines how political power, institutions, and norms shape property rights for firms. Through a series of simple survey experiments, Property Rights and Property Wrongs explores how political power, personal connections, elections, concerns for reputation, legal facts, and social norms influence property rights disputes from hostile corporate takeovers to debt collection to renationalization. This work argues that property rights in Russia are better seen as an evolving bargain between rulers and rightholders than as simply a reflection of economic transition, Russian culture, or a weak state. The result is a nuanced view of the political economy of Russia that contributes to central debates in economic development, comparative politics, and legal studies.
The chapter of the book systematically examine various effects of resource curse in such arenas as rule of law and property rights in Russia in comparison with the other oil-and-gas exporting countries beginning from the XXI century.
The 1986 article by Grossman and Hart, “A Theory of Vertical and Lateral Integration,” has provided a framework for understanding how firm boundaries are defined and how they affect economic performance. The property rights approach has provided a formal way to introduce incomplete contracting ideas into economic modelling. This book collects papers and opinion pieces on the impact that this property right approach to the firm has had on the economics profession. It shows that the impact has been felt sometimes in significant ways in a variety of fields, ranging from the theory of the firm and its internal organization to industrial organization, international trade, finance, management, public economy, and political economy and political science. Beyond acknowledging how the property rights approach has permeated economics as a whole, the contributions also highlight the road ahead, showing how the paradigm may change the way research is performed in some fields, and what type of research is still missing. The book concludes with a discussion of the foundations of the property rights and more generally the incomplete contracting approaches to the firm and with a series of contributions showing how behavioral considerations may provide a new way forward.
After the imperial land consolidation acts of 1906, the Russian land commune became a center of territorial struggle where complex alliances of actors, strategies, and representations of territory enacted land enclosure beyond the exclusive control of the state. Using original documentation of Russian imperial land deals obtained in the federal and municipal archives, this study explores how the Russian imperial state and territories in the periphery were dialectically co-produced not only through institutional manipulations, educational programs, and resettlement plans but also through political and public discourses. This paper examines how coalitions of landed nobility and land surveyors, landless serfs, and peasant proprietors used enclosure as conduits for property violence, accumulation of capital, or, in contrast, as a means of territorial autonomy. Through this example, I bring a territorial dimension into Russian agrarian scholarship by positioning the rural politics of the late imperial period within the global context of capitalist land enclosure. At the same time, by focusing on the reading of territory from the Russian historical perspective, I introduce complexity into the modern territory discourse often found in Western political geographic interpretations.
The book presents a political and economic analysis of the the last decades, in the center of which there is a role five "I" - ideas, interests, a historical path, institutions and illusions. Russian economic reforms are a complex of processes, including both forward and back movements and associated not only with the actions of political leaders, but also with objective circumstances. During the reforms there is a mutual influence of new radical ideas, driven by intellectual and political elites, interests that are defended by different groups of influence, and institutions (rules of the game) arising under the influence of these ideas and interests. Key interest groups, in turn, form not accidentally, but under the influence of the specific historical path of the countries. Finally, economic development is seriously influenced by illusions experienced by a society that is not satisfied with the ways of economic development and the dynamics of real incomes.
What characteristics of firms give them the confidence to invest in settings rife with expropriation by local officials? Empirically, firms in the developing world often face the threat of expropriation from local agents of the state rather than a centralized autocrat. Because policing local officials is costly, the state cannot easily credibly commit to doing so. This has negative consequences for investment. We argue that one solution is to allow firms to approach the state directly to ask for intervention. Not all firms are equally able to successfully get the attention of the state, however, so this mechanism only works for some. We develop an argument about the firm-level characteristics – large-scale employment, political connections, foreign ownership, and business association membership – that should make the central state more attentive to calls for help. Because firm with these characteristics are more likely to secure intervention against predatory bureaucrats, the latter are less likely to try to expropriate them. These firms’ investment decisions should be less sensitive to local expropriation than other firms. We test this argument using data on cases of decentralized expropriation across Russia’s regions and firm-level data from a cross-regional, large scale survey of Russian firms.