The ratings of economic and political institutions are well-known and widely used in the Social Science literature. These ratings are heavily relied on Experts' evaluations with subjective ordinal ranking (i.g., from -10 to 10 points). Such evaluations can be occasionally driven by ideological...

Fiscal gap is an indicator of long run sustainability of government finance. It is used for assessment of the extent to which current fiscal policy is able to keep government budget solvent in the longer period. Fiscal gap is derived from intertemporal budget constraint which connects flows of...

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...

In this paper we extend the stationarity test proposed by Kurozumi and Tanaka (2010) for reducing size distortion with one structural break. We find the bias up to the order of 1/T for four types of models containing structural breaks. The simulations on finite samples show a reduction of size...

In this paper we extend the stationarity test proposed by Kurozumi and Tanaka (2010) for reducing size distortion with one structural break. We find the bias up to the order of 1/T for four types of models containing structural breaks. The simulations on finite samples show a reduction of size...

The principal objective of this paper is to discuss shortcomings of the current paradigm of provision of the retirement income. The main conclusion is that in post-industrial society the traditional pension system, a mandatory and comprehensive earnings related scheme, should be replaced by a...

In the next decade the Russian tax system will face tremendous challenges, due to both objective factors (significant dependence of the Russian economy on foreign trade conjuncture, etc) and a number of decisions in the field of fiscal policy. Viewing these challenges the authors examine three...

This paper deals with 2008-2009 crisis which marked a new stage of Russia’s budgetary policy. Although the budget situation in Russia is presently much better than in the majority of the developed countries, reservation of high dependence on oil proceeds, observed trends in in the structure of...