“Improvements” in the mechanisms of democracy for making decisions about providing taxpayer-financed public goods can lead the economy in the same direction as authoritarianism. Such a by-product may be insignificant, but, even if so, a tradition of abridging democracy, similarly to an...

How to import modern Western Institutions to suppress economic growth in underdeveloped countries? Russian experience and some warnings for newcoming reformers The monograph «Institutional Constraints on Modern Economic Growth" deals with the most dangerous obstacles standing in the way of long...

This research is devoted to political and economic aspects of closed democracy institutions afoot. The book describes basic approaches to contrastive analysis in this field, typical problems that cause deviations in democratic institutional system’s development and major conditions and ways to...

Modern approaches to immigration policies in most developed countries make the problems of adaptation for new arrivals more severe. Protracted failure to adapt among immigrants (and even of their descendants) turns into recurrent problems vis-a-vis the law, and even extends into large scale...

Historical data on US aid to Israel illustrates incentives of political leaders and special interests, first and foremost in Israel. As on the early stages of Alliance Israel military capabilities could provide valuable services to USA, undermining USSR influence in the Middle East, the current...

In the frame of the present research we considered a hypothesis on the existence of a trend to a widespreading of standards and practices which expand the horizon of the regional authorities' discretion and possibilities for their discretionary regulation, due to the federal authorities'...

The last decade’s Reforms in post-communist countries demonstrated, the aid proved to be most efficient in the countries where due to a timely schedule and consistency in reform implementation, governments can easily do without it. In case of Russia both the reformists and officials of...

If the authorities have the opportunity to receive incomes uncontrolled by society, this gives them great freedom of action. Such incomes do not depend on the quality of the public goods delivered, nor on the investment climate. Given a certain minimal level of organization, taxpayers can try to...

The voter - bureaucrat is locked into a situation of a conflict of interests: as a conscientious citizen, he or she should support optimal expenditure levels for providing certain public goods, but as a person whose wellbeing and career depend on the volume of expenditures for providing public...

Adam Smith pointed out public respect, prestige as significant component of compensation "for some employment" ("honorableness... of employment"). We assumed, the public moral sanction on success (Weber), public demand for "self-made man" should correlate positively with number of businessmen...