In the past two decades, controversial evidence has been produced supporting the case for local protectionism in China. This paper overviews the most important contributions and presents a new approach which applies spatial econometrics on prefectural-level data. The main advantage of this...

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

The paper discusses the relative importance of the 'real' political actions versus the changes of symbolic nature in the bargaining over devolution, studying the case of personnel decentralization in security agencies in Russia in 2000-2007. While in the 1990s under Boris Yeltsin regional...

While the regional economic integration encompassing the former Soviet Union (FSU) transpires to be inefficient, there appears to be a stronger interest in regionalism in smaller groups of more homogenous and geographically connected countries of the region, specifically, Central Asia. Using a...

The absence or the presence of the resource curse is often explained by the specifics of political and institutional factors. The aim of this paper is to study this effect looking separately at economic and political institutions and at their interaction. Unlike most empirical papers in the...

The aim of the paper is to study the relation between the demand for human rights and for economic prosperity. It analyzes the demand not, as it is often done in the literature, from the 'voice' perspective (political activity), but rather looks at the 'exit' perspective (migration patterns)....

The accuracy of a tax return is usually interpreted as an outcome of the tax evasion decision by an individual. However, in non-democratic regimes with predatory blackmail tax systems it is possible that large sums voluntarily reported by influential politicians or businessmen may be used as...

The paper examines the interdependence of historical legacies and current contextual factors as determinants of economic and political performance. It shows that behavioral patterns based on identical legacies could lead to very different (if not the opposite) results in regions with different...