Adam Smith defeats Karl Marx: this shorthand summary of the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was not uncommon during the early years of reform. But would Adam Smith approve of the nature of the economic transition in Russia? This essay, drawing intensively...

This paper studies the effect of Russia's invasion of Ukraine on the performance of firms in Central Asia. It uses unique data from the Business Pulse Survey run by the World Bank in the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, which tracks the sales and employment-along with other main...

Data from 2,251 small and medium-size farms for 2021 and 2022 show that area reductions in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine remained limited. However, worsening terms of trade reduced farm profitability, implying that 46 percent of farms had a negative cash flow and 54 percent (67...