Article
Размышления о книге Д. Е. Раскова «Экономические институты старообрядчества» (СПб.: Изд. дом СПбГУ, 2012)
The author presents a review of the book «The Economic Institutions of the Old Believers». The study is at the crossroads of economic history, economic sociology, economic theory (in the first place, the new institutionalism) and maybe even religious studies. The author tries to understand the mysterious phenomenon of Old Believe entrepreneurship, played a very important role in the economic development of Russia in the late XVIII-early XX centuries.
The book is dedicated to the great German sociologist Max Weber. This volume contains eleven papers originating from a symposium organized by Aleksanteri Institute in 2007. The scholars from Russia, Finland and other countries discuss various aspects of Weber's heritage and its relationship to Russia.
The article discusses several approaches to the study of Soviet society drawing on Max Weber’s theoretical models or following a broadly-understood Weberian tradition in historical sociology. Weberian perspectives have been used for the analysis of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its aftermath. The early Bolshevik Party has been characterized as a community of “ideological virtuosi” while its further development has been described either as “incomplete rationalization” or as a re-traditionalization. In the article, it is argued that employing the post-Weberian multiple modernities approach allows us to overcome some of the difficulties that have emerged in this case. In particular, the article focuses on Johann Arnason’s analysis of the Soviet model of modernity. For Arnason, the Soviet model incorporated both the legacy of imperial transformation from above and the revolutionary vision of a new society. He claims that communism represented a distinctive version of modernity rather than a deviation from the modernizing mainstream. In recent historical studies of the Soviet period, two approaches have been formed stressing the modernity of the Soviet regime or its neo-traditionalist aspects. The distinction between these approaches has been discussed by Michael David-Fox. The article considers the parallels between the new historical studies of Soviet society, on the one hand, and both Weberian and post-Weberian sociological perspectives, on the other.
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.
It is argued that Weberian concepts such as 'charisma of reason' and 'patrimonial bureaucracy' can be applied to the Soviet system at different stages of its evolution. Neo-Weberian theories which are not based directly on Weber's ideas can also be relevant for the study of Soviet society. But theoretical approaches of historical sociology should be complemented with more empirically oriented social history of the Soviet period.
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.