According to the conventional wisdom, military conversion in Russia would be more difficult than in the United States because Russia does not have the developed market infrastructure and institutions that help western defense firms redeploy resources for civilian production. A closer look raises...

Using comparable 2002–2011 data, we examine the effect of oil on growth of Russia’s regions and American states. Although Russia’s oil regions are richer than other regions, they did not grow faster, while US oil producers grew faster than other states. We attribute these differences to...

Budget consolidation and reduction of budget deficit are now becoming more urgent issues for a number of countries, especially for the European Union members. Though, today debt ratio is low at both federal and subnational levels in Russia, economic slowdown, problems with oil and gas related...

This note argues that the most commonly used estimates of the size of the unofficial economies in the former Soviet republics are flawed. Most important, they are based on calculations that disregard the variation in unofficial economic activity across space in the pre-transition Soviet Union....

This note argues that the most commonly used estimates of the size of the unofficial economies in the former Soviet republics are flawed. Most important, they are based on calculations that disregard the variation in unofficial economic activity across space in the pre-transition Soviet Union....