What are the effects of capture of legislature and regulations by few politically powerful firms on growth and redistribution? We build direct measures of regulatory capture and firms' political power based on a unique micro-level dataset on preferential treatment of selected firms by Russian...

Our article presents an index of institutional complementarity for 27 postcommunist economies, and evaluates a key claim of the Varieties of Capitalism paradigm. The empirical novelty of the index lies in its integration of informal institutions as well as its combination of macro-level and...

The 15 newly independent states that emerged from the breakdown of the Soviet Union are now celebrating their 10th anniversary of independence. This paper looks back over the first decade and draws some lessons from the experience made to date. It focuses on the energy-rich states of the...

This chapter takes stock of growth trends in Belarusian economy since 1996, reviews the evidence of accumulated challenges and risks within the existing growth patterns, and provides policy recommendations aimed at strengthening growth sustainability. In sum, while economic growth in Belarus in...

This paper develops additional economic arguments to emphasize the potential importance of the Diasporas' contribution to economic transformation of former socialist economies. At the same time, it argues that so far this potential has been grossly underutilized, especially in the economies of...

This paper analyzes two dimensions of factors of political trust in Russia. The first dimension is the target dimension (sociotropic vs. egocentric), the second dimension is the time dimension (retrospective vs. perspective). The study is based on the microdata of 2016 Life in Transition Survey...

In many respects, the specifically Chinese way of transition from the planned to the market economy contradicts conventional wisdom of economics. This paper proposes an institutionalist explanation of the seeming paradox, which starts out from the structural diversity of the Chinese economy and...

This article reassesses the meaning of transition. After a critical review of the traditional approach, it is argued that meaningful transition requires emphasis on the change of the institutional path-dependent process. In this light, the issue of transition may also apply to the West. Put...