Institutional Matrices and the Development of Russia, or Introduction to X&Y Theory

This is an English-language summary of the book “Institucionalniye matricy i razvitie Rossii: vvedenie v Х-Y teoriyu” (Moscow & St. Petersburg: Nestor-Istoriya, 2014. - 468 p. ISBN 978-5-4469-0316-0). The two previous editions of the book were entitled “Institutional Matrices and the Development of Russia” and appeared in Russian in 2000 and 2001 in Moscow and Novosibirsk, respectively. The fundamental principles and structure of the book remain, but the text was considerably revised and extended with the inclusion of new facts and further development of the theory’s main principles regarding institutional matrices. The present edition exceeds the previous ones by almost one and a half times their volume. We introduce a new extended version of the institutional matrices theory, or X&Y-theory, and clarify its main provisions. We also provide new evidence of the institutional matrices’ role in shaping the main trends in the global socio-economic development and strengthening the bipolarity of the world. It serves to explain the enhancement in the emerging global order of the countries with a predominant institutional X-matrix, such as Russia, Asian and Latin American countries, with respect to countries with a predominant institutional Y-matrix like Europe, North America, and Australia. The paper also gives evidence of the fulfillment of earlier forecasts of institutional dynamics in the Russian society