In the aftermath of sovereign default of August 1998, the hypothesis of virtual economy in Russia developed by Gaddy and Ickes has gained popularity. The hypothesis states that the country has not moved towards free-market economy but developed a system of implicit price subsidization similar to...

Clifford Gaddy's and Barry Ickes' paradigm of the "virtual economy" has fundamentally changed the way people think about Russia's economy. Circulated at the highest levels of the Russian and U.S. governments and reported in leading publications worldwide, their thesis--that Russia's economy is...

Theory and economic intuition suggest that domestic institutions influence the employment impact of economic reform, but the evidence base is thin. This paper seeks to address this by examining the extent to which differences in regional labour market flexibility shaped the impact of...

Growth empirics with institutional measures is performed for 25 transition countries overthe period 1990-95. Estimation results suggest that (particularly state) institutions aresignificant for growth and, especially, foreign direct investment (FDI), the latter in turnbeing important for the...