The post-communist transition in the former Soviet Union (FSU) cannot be considered entirely successful, especially in the political and institutional spheres. Nevertheless, in the economic sphere, the transition process succeeded in rebuilding the foundations of market economies based on...

This paper studies structural transformation of Soviet Russia in 1928-1940 from an agrarian to an industrial economy through the lens of a two-sector neoclassical growth model. We construct a large dataset that covers Soviet Russia during 1928-1940 and Tsarist Russia during 1885-1913. We use a...

Soviet growth over 1960-89 was the worst in the world after we control for investment and human capital; the relative performance worsens over time. The declining Soviet growth rate over 1950-87 is explained by the declining marginal product of capital; the rate of TFP growth is roughly constant...

The highest rates of growth of labor productivity in the Soviet Union were observed not in the 1930s (3% annually), but in the 1950s (6%). The TFP growth rates by decades increased from 0.6% annually in the 1930s to 2.8% in the 1950s and then fell monotonously becoming negative in the 1980s. The...

Simon Kuznets was born and educated in Russia and the Soviet Ukraine. He completed his economic education and adopted his research methodology in the United States where Wesley Mitchell was a major influence during his early career. Though scarred by the trauma of displacement, eviction, and...

This paper is a draft of the concluding chapter of The industrialisation of Soviet Russia, vol. 7: The Soviet economy and the approach of war, 1937–1939, in preparation for publication by Palgrave Macmillan. We consider the development of the Soviet economy over the period of the series, that...

The analysis presented in this report assembles, for the first time, evidence from a variety of sources in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to show that policy and institutional reforms are important in achieving higher productivity growth. However, significant...