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...

Advocates of the war against discrimination and affirmative action claim it is necessary to set up additional regulatory procedures that will defend interests of minorities who, previously, were not given enough chances to succeed. Because there is no set definition of a minority who suffered...

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...

The link between an introduction of the universal suffrage and the growth of government spending has been established in some literature (Meltzer, Richard, 1981, Aidt et al., 2006, Funk and Guthmann, 2006). In this article we try to identify a more detailed mechanism behind that link. So, we...

“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...

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...

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'...

In 2005 Russian Federation moved from the elections of the regional governor to their appointment by the federal center. The study analyzes the possible changes in the regional governments fiscal policy due to the change of the preferences aggregation mechanism at the regional level. It includes...

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...