Was taxation so heavy in the Russian transition that firms could not stay afloat? is the question that this paper aims to answer. It details the fiscal structure and uses data from a number of sources to calculate statutory tax rates faced by businesses in 1995. The results show that statutory...

Was taxation so heavy in the Russian transition that firms could not stay afloat?” is the question that this paper aims to answer. It details the fiscal structure and uses data from a number of sources to calculate statutory tax rates faced by businesses in 1995. The results show that...

The unusual rise and fall of non-monetary trade (NMT) in the Russian transition has been a subject of heated debates. Yet, this phenomenon is often viewed as a peculiarity that one cannot explain by economic considerations alone. In this paper we show that the resort to NMT was a rational,...