The paper provides an overview of the course of economic reform and the performance of the Russian economy since the early 1990s and an analysis of the structural reform challenges ahead. It assesses the contribution of institutional and structural reforms to economic performance over the...

Competition among local governments in a decentralized political system is often thought to discipline lazy or corrupt officials, improving public good provision and increasing welfare. Some scholars note possible distortions due to spillovers or a race-to-the-bottom, but suggest that central...

Originally the Laffer Curve was formulated in a macroeconomic context, for which reason it is not applicable to individual taxes, but rather to a certain average aggregate tax. The 'corrections' to the Laffer Curve are based on a factor of time. High importance is the question – in which...

This paper studies the institutions for exercise of property rights in forestry, fisheries, and mining in Siberia and the Russian Far East, linking current arrangements with the administrative structures of the command era. It describes production, income, and structural change in Asian Russia...

Most previous fiscal reforms in Russia have focused on problems at the federal level or in the system of federal transfers to the regional governments. This report focuses instead on opportunities for reform at the subnational level. It reviews recent trends in fiscal adjustment, budgeting, and...

The paper provides an empirical analysis of the determinants of fiscal decentralization within Russian regions in 1994-2001. The conventional view that more decentralized governments are found in regions/countries with higher income, higher ethnolinguistic fractionalization, and higher levels of...

Two hypotheses about the determinants of Russian intergovernmental grants are tested empirically. According to first hypothesis, federal transfers to regions correlate with recent voting behavior of regional electorates. Second hypothesis states that transfers are higher in regions with...