It is a typical case in the practice of reforms, when a reformer, who seeks to introduce an institution with desired properties, discovers that its immediate implementation is impossible because of resource, technological, cultural, political or institutional constraints. In this case, one has...

Governments dislike poorly performing public firms and often see deregulation and privatisation as a way to improve performance and social welfare. From a theoretical point of view poor performance may be due to information asymmetries between the informed public firm and the relatively...

This paper is based on the author’s lecture given at the Russian Summer School on Institutional Analysis 2007, organized by the State University — Higher School of Economics with the financial support of Innovation educational program. The author defines a reform as an intentional...

This is the first part of the research devoted to the problem of the choice of institutional reform strategies. A strategy is defined as a planned trajectory of institutional changes in time. Three types of strategies are compared: shock therapy, gradual growing, and interim institution...

The economic "battle" that took place in Russia in 1992 consisted of the struggle between the liberally-oriented government and the labor collectives, the latter of which regarded the government's reform program as an attempt to encroach upon the established system of collective property. The...

In this paper we try to describe the main feature of Russian civic culture that could influence the outcome of the reform, initiated in 1992, and discuss channels through which the influence was realized. We begin with consideration of paternalism and what we call “habitual deviationism”,...

An attempt is made to define main problems of the privatization theory and to present a survey of some results in this area. Two models are discussed that demonstrate paradoxical consequences of property right restrictions and dynamics of property right redistribution which entails a...

Recent studies of processes of economic reforms testified that realization of liberal school recipes resulted in nonadequate losses. Basing on these studies,the author singles out a number of fundamental mistakes of the neoliberal conception. The neoliberals ignored costs of institutional...

This is the second part of the work devoted to the problem of the choice of institutional reform strategies. In the first part a concept of a promising trajectory was introduced. This is a trajectory that has good chances to be successful since it meets a number of requirements; their list was...