One of the main obstacles for successful economic development is the formation of institutional traps, inefficient yet stable norms of behaviour. Domination of barter exchange, arrears, corruption and black market activities are examples of institutional traps that have hampered reforms in...

The theory of institutional traps, i.e. ineffective but stable institutions or behavior norms, is develope din connection with economic reforms. Mechanisms are described that cause a system to get into a trap and ways of going out of it are analyzed. Concepts of transformation costs and...

In our previous papers (Polterovich V., Popov V., 2007; Polterovich V., Popov V., Tonis A., 2006) it was shown that democratization (increase in the political rights index of the Freedom house in 1970-2000) can negatively affect economic growth, if the quality of institutions at the beginning of the...

The Russian labor market was characterized with three main features: a weak sensitivity of employment levels to changing conditions, a high variability of wage, large inter-firm flows of labor resources. This paper recommends a model of a collective firm explaining these phenomena. The main...

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...

Transplantation of institutions is an important part of reforms in many developing and transition economies. However, principles and methods of transplantation are not developed and therefore many transplantation attempts failed. This is a case for numerous projects of accelerated building the...

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, it is shown that the concept “economic imperialism” has no real content with epistemological point of view: there is no evidence of using specific economic methodology in areas of other social disciplines. Economics is in a permanent crisis caused by the impossibility to...

We propose a difference-differential equation that reflects interactions between innovation and imitation processes to describe the evolution of the distribution curve of firms by efficiency levels. An explicit solution of this equation is obtained for arbitrary finite initial conditions. It is...

This article presents the first part of the work on how instruments and methods of the growth promotion should change as a country approaches the level of advanced economies in terms of welfare and the quality of institutions. We describe the evolution of economic policies in Western countries...