The past 15 months have seen the beginning of structural change in Russia but a failure of the economy to stabilize. The balance sheet, conclude the authors suggests that a return to centralized control remain almost impossible, but the dencentralization that has occurred contain many...

The authors analyze changes in the Russian labor market in 1992. They focus on the path of wages and employment in a context of partial price liberalization and considerable ambiguity about government and central bank policy. Under the former Soviet economy, the firm was the bedrock of the...

Registered unemployment in Russia is now 2 percent; surveys indicate a true rate of between 5 and 6 percent. Until now, flow in and out of unemployment have been quite large, with duration low. This may be changing as the ease with which workers are matched to jobs declines -- in part because of...

The authors surveyed 41 firms in and around Moscow in the last two weeks of November 1992 to get an empirical handle on how firms are responding to the changing economic environment. They found the following conclusions. There were large negative (supply and demand) shocks to output for a...

'Measuring the Effectiveness of Social Protection: Concepts and Applications' provides the conceptual and analytical framework for assessing social protection (SP) programs, as well as provides a practical guide for users seeking to conduct analysis, particularly using the World Bank's Software...

This note provides guidance to policy makers who are looking to utilize Social Safety Nets (SSNs) to mitigate the welfare impacts of energy subsidy reforms (ESRs) on the poor. The good practice note explains (a) why SSNs are an effective tool in the context of ESR, and (b) different options for...

This report updates the assessment of the performance of the social protection (SP) system in Russia, using the 2014-2017 rounds of the Survey on Incomes and the Participation in Social Programs (VNDN in Russian) by the State Statistic Service of the Russian Federation (Rosstat), the largest...

It is widely accepted that the costs of underpricing energy are large, whether in advanced or developing countries. This paper explores how large these costs can be by focussing on the size of the external effects that energy subsidies in particular generate in two important sectors-transport...

One challenge in transition economies has been to avoid being caught between overrapid restructuring (harmful to the private sector) and gradual change (can undermine robust private sector emergence). Empirical evidence suggests that in most of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union,...