The authors suggest that the rapid growth of the illegal underground economy in 1970s and 1980s has destabilized the Soviet state economy and weakened the mechanism of central planning. This hypothesis is advanced on the basis of the examination of striking decline in income (legal) elasticities...

Summary and analysis of data on consumption of alcoholic beverages, alcohol abuse, and health and demographic impact of drinking in the USSR and Russia. Criticism of published statistics and author's estimates of unavailable data. A special section addresses fatal alcohol poisoning which...

The purpose of this paper is to summarize and offer analytical comments concerning the availability and reliability of official government statistics on alcohol and related issues in the former Soviet Union and contemporary Russia. The paper is organized in six section. The introduction (Section...