The purpose of this study is to analyze the course, determinants and political economy of economic reforms in Russia conducted in the period 1985-2003. The year 1985 can be considered an important turning point in Soviet/Russian history, marked as it was by the election of Mikhail Gorbachev to...

Ideology is pretty efficient machinery to decrease collective action's costs. People not need to communicate or even to be familiar one another to participate the joint action, to support the policy or resist the same. The chapter studies the impact which new ideologies of the 21st century...

How to import modern Western Institutions to suppress economic growth in underdeveloped countries? Russian experience and some warnings for newcoming reformers The monograph «Institutional Constraints on Modern Economic Growth" deals with the most dangerous obstacles standing in the way of long...

Advocates of the war against discrimination and affirmative action claim it is necessary to set up additional regulatory procedures that will defend interests of minorities who, previously, were not given enough chances to succeed. Because there is no set definition of a minority who suffered...

Modern approaches to immigration policies in most developed countries make the problems of adaptation for new arrivals more severe. Protracted failure to adapt among immigrants (and even of their descendants) turns into recurrent problems vis-a-vis the law, and even extends into large scale...

The link between an introduction of the universal suffrage and the growth of government spending has been established in some literature (Meltzer, Richard, 1981, Aidt et al., 2006, Funk and Guthmann, 2006). In this article we try to identify a more detailed mechanism behind that link. So, we...

Can the absence of freedom of speech, a monopolized media market, and a politicized education create obstacles which will stand in the way of economic growth? The answer is an unambiguous Yes, and substantially. Partial, biased, or heteronomous mass media and an education turned into a...

“Improvements” in the mechanisms of democracy for making decisions about providing taxpayer-financed public goods can lead the economy in the same direction as authoritarianism. Such a by-product may be insignificant, but, even if so, a tradition of abridging democracy, similarly to an...

In this paper we consider questions of morality as a factor impacting trust in society, as an important element of the “soft” infrastructure. Morality is the institution which, if it is maintained in an appropriate condition, is capable of significantly raising the efficacy level of the...

The ratings of political institutions are well-known and widely used in academic literature. These ratings are mostly based on expert evaluations. However, such evaluations can be subjective and occasionally driven by ideological considerations. In this paper we propose two new indicators of...