‘Eurasia’ seems to be a relatively clear concept in terms of physical geography, but much less so for social sciences. While the word ‘Eurasia’ is constantly used in various contexts (more today than twenty years ago), the specific notion of what it actually means is unclear. According...

This note reviews two possible approaches to political economics scholarship - one concentrating on redistribution conflicts under the assumption of homogenous preferences and one focusing on preference heterogeneity and, among other issues, cultural specificty of agents. It discusses both...

The paper investigates the determinants and consequences of variation of development of the civil society across Russian regions. It starts by looking at factors explaining the level of development of civil society in Russian regions. In the next step, it links the development of civil society...

In recent years, BRIC countries have demonstrated high rates of economic growth, rapid increases in GDP per capita and growing capital accumulation, and have been playing an increasingly important role in the global economy. However, as middle-income countries (low-income in the case of India),...

This note reviews the implications of the political crisis around Ukraine and of the economic crisis in Russia on the development of Eurasian regionalism and, in particular, the future of the Eurasian Economic Union. It identifies the key effects of the crises, as well as discusses alternative...

The paper confronts different aspects of decentralization: fiscal decentralization, post-constitutional regulatory decentralization, and constitutional decentralization – using a single dataset from Russian Federation of the Yeltsin period as a politically asymmetric country. It finds...

While the poor quality of governance is widely accepted as a main factor hampering economic development in Central Asia, one of the main ways to solve this problem is often connected with changing the allocation of authorities, shifting them to the supranational (regional integration) or...

The aim of the paper is to understand the specifics of the interaction of two models of regional economic integration co-existing in Eastern Europe: the post-Soviet integration and the cooperation with the EU. The paper claims that institutional competition between integration projects may...

The aim of the paper is to understand how the structure of government-business relations influences the quality of institutions and economic development in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The paper identifies the key elements of the business community engaged in negotiations with the state, explores...

The paper provides a survey of theoretical and empirical literature on non-linear impact of democracy on economic growth. First, it looks at two main approaches to the non-linearity: the U-shape and the inverse U-shape. Then it proceeds by looking at the specifics of hybrid regimes and tries to...