A range of factors drive size of government: relative prices, the age-dependency ratio, how long a country has been independent, relative political freedom, and openness in trade. Larger governments tend to limit growth, but that tendency can be offset by well-functioning institutions and...

It is widely accepted that the costs of underpricing energy are large, whether in advanced or developing countries. This paper explores how large these costs can be by focussing on the size of the external effects that energy subsidies in particular generate in two important sectors?transport...

The paper investigates adjustment costs of trade liberalization in Russia by estimating various labor market elasticities with respect to indicators of trade liberalization in the 90-ies. In particular, the influence of tariff reduction on demand for labor is estimated, inter-sectoral employment...

The main objectives of this paper are to estimate the burden of tobacco-caused mortality as a whole and by main tobacco-related diseases in Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, and Ukraine, and to assess the distributional health impact of an increase in tobacco taxation in these three countries....

The paper is a survey of literature and statistical sources on poverty and inequality in Russia in the 1990s and the 2000s. It serves as a background to OECD (2011), the OECD Labour Market and Social Policy Review of the Russian Federation that was released in 2011. We start with an overview of...

The purpose of the paper is to analyze the e¤ects of changes in policy of child benefit provision on child poverty. In particular, we examine whether the introduction of means-testing schemes in the regions has improved targeting of child benefits. We test whether the probability of being paid...

The paper investigates adjustment costs of trade liberalization in Russia by estimating the influence of tariff policy in the 90-ies on the level and volatility of employment and wages. In particular, we study the labor demand and labor supply channels and address the following issues. First,...

Using individual-level data on registered unemployed collected by the Federal Employment Service in Voronezh province of Russia (1996-2000), we test some basic hypotheses on the influence of individual attributes (gender and education, in particular), working history, the specifics of the...