The paper addresses the problem of similarities and divergence of transition paths at the later stage of transition in the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The main aim is to clarify the influence of specifics of government-business relations on economic reforms carried out...

The paper examines the interdependence of historical legacies and current contextual factors as determinants of economic and political performance. It shows that behavioral patterns based on identical legacies could lead to very different (if not the opposite) results in regions with different...

The paper examines the interdependence of historical legacies and current contextual factors as determinants of economic and political performance. It shows that behavioral patterns based on identical legacies could lead to very different (if not the opposite) results in regions with different...

The paper examines the interdependence of historical legacies and current contextual factors as determinants of economic and political performance. It shows that behavioral patterns based on identical legacies could lead to very different (if not the opposite) results in regions with different...

The aim of the paper is to understand how the structure of government-business relations influences the quality of institutions and economic development in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The paper identifies the key elements of the business community engaged in negotiations with the state, explores...

Although decentralization is often modeled as an outcome of bargaining over rents and poli-cies, intuitively it seems possible that public statements, symbols and status often have a great impact on this process. The paper studies the relative importance of the “real” political actions...

While the poor quality of governance is widely accepted as a main factor hampering economic development in Central Asia, one of the main ways to solve this problem is often connected with changing the allocation of authorities, shifting them to the supranational (regional integration) or...

The accuracy of a tax return is usually interpreted as an outcome of the tax evasion decision by an individual. However, in non-democratic regimes with predatory blackmail tax systems it is possible that large sums voluntarily reported by influential politicians or businessmen may be used as...

The paper investigates the influence of path dependence on corruption in Russian regions. We show that even twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, regions with a higher share of Communist Party members in the 1970s have substantially higher corruption.

The paper investigates the influence of outside options on the predatory behavior of autocrats. An outside option is referred to as the opportunity of an incumbent ruler to continue his career outside his current territory of control. The paper uses data on the effectiveness of tax collection...