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...

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)....