Government-business relations in post-Soviet space: The case of Central Asia

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 consistency of formal and informal institutions and the balance of power between the state and the business and analyzes how these particular power relations and inconsistencies influence the economic development via both designing formal institutions and affecting strategies of private and public actors.Government-business relations, Central Asia, consistency of institutions

Internal centralization and international integration in the post-Soviet space

An important but often neglected factor influencing the changes in power relations in Eurasia is the development of center-periphery relations in individual countries. Domestic and international politics are never clearly separated, especially in the emerging post-Soviet states, which still maintain strong economic, cultural and political links among each other. The aim of the paper is to understand how international integration and domestic policy (re)centralization influenced each other in the post-Soviet countries. It looks at four possible combinations of the development of regionalism and decentralization observed in the CIS region over the last two decades and develops a simple framework explaining the differences between these case studies.regional integration; decentralization; post-Soviet countries; multi-level governance

Russia's Integration into the World Economy: An Interjurisdictional Competition View

The aim of the paper is to analyze the problems of Russia´s integration into the world economy from the point of view of the theory of interjurisdictional competition. It argues, that huge exit-effects in the Russian economy do not lead to increasing quality of institutions and economic policies. In order to explain this situation, the paper focuses on the demand and supply sides of the market for institutions and public policies. Their behavior patterns contribute to the stabilization of the inefficient equilibrium. From the normative point of view, the result of the paper is that Russia´s integration into the world economy can succeed, only if the political institutions are transformed and centers of private economic power are weakened.Economic integration, Russia, interjurisdictional competition

Government-Business Relations and Catching Up Reforms in the CIS

The paper addresses the problem of similarities and divergence of transition paths at the later stage of transition in the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The main aim is to clarify the influence of specifics of government-business relations on economic reforms carried out at the later stage of transition in countries, which have been relatively less successful during the earlier transition. The paper discusses potential channels of influence of institutional organization of government-business relations on economic reforms and compares government-business relation models and paths of transition in Russia, Kazakhstan and UkrainePost-Soviet economies, catching up reforms, institutional trap, government-business relations

Essays on Asymmetric Federalism

The growing research on fiscal and political federalism in economics (as well as rational choice political science) basically shares two main assumptions regarding federal institutions: it takes democratic and symmetric federations as the reference point. Democracy means that the decision making is based on elections and/or referenda, which effectively constraint the actions of politicians. Symmetry means that the ”degree of devolution” for all regions is identical. In particular, if both federal and regional budgets are funded by a common split tax, the de-jure retention rate is identical for all states. It goes without saying that there is a multitude of models looking at economic asymmetry between regions: most federations include states or regions with significantly different economic potential, population and territory, obviously influencing both their comparative economic performance and their behavior in the federal bargaining. However, the economic asymmetry does not (necessarily) provide an identity mapping into the asymmetric devolution in terms of formal institutions and informal policy making (what I refer to as ”asymmetric federation” in this paper): this issue requires careful analysis.Federalism; decentralization; Russia.

Models of market integration in Central Asia – comparative performance

The paper considers the problem of the integration of markets in Central Asia as a main factor of economic modernization. It first identifies the potential channels of reduction of transaction costs barriers between countries (“models of integration”). Second, it looks at the emergence of these channels, and identifies two main puzzles: success of centralization in individual countries vs. failing international cooperation among them and successful informal cooperation of companies and trade networks vs. deficits of intergovernmental concerted actions. Third, it looks at the impact of the relative success of emerging models of market integration for the balance of power in Central Asia.Central Asia, regionalization, regionalism, decentralization

Economic role of public administration in Central Asia: Decentralization and hybrid political regime

The aim of the paper is to understand how the organization of public administration in Central Asia shapes the results of economic development in the region. It discusses the main factors of bad quality of public administration in the region, paying particular attention to the link between political regimes and public administration. Moreover, it provides an overview of decentralization and devolution of power in Central Asian countries as one of the main channels of transformation of administration. The paper covers both formal decentralization and informal distribution of power between levels of government.Public administration, hybrid regimes, decentralization

Democracy and growth: is the effect non-linear?

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 understand, whether the results could be driven by specific features of some semi-democracies and semi-autocracies. Finally, it discusses the opportunity to test the growth-and-democracy nexus using subnational data, and considers the first results of this approach.democracy; growth; U-shaped relation

Words or deeds - what matters? Experience of recentralization in Russian security agencies

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 branches of federal ministries in Russia were mostly captured by regional governors, allowing them to pass acts directly contradicting federal law, in 2000s the administration of Vladimir Putin gradually replaced the heads of regional branches by new bureaucrats, supposedly without any connections to the region. The results differ for different security agencies; however, the paper finds, surprisingly, that in several cases the appointment decisions were robustly influenced rather by symbolic gestures made by regional governments in the earlier bargaining process than by the actual devolution policies of the regions. --Devolution,bargaining,transition economies

Ex ante and ex post institutional convergence: Case of the post-Soviet space

Abstract: The paper discusses the interaction of ex ante and ex post institutional convergence in the post-Soviet world, i.e. 12 members of the Commonwealth of Independent States. It starts with analysing empirical evidence for institutional convergence in the CIS, and then considers two channels of convergence: institutional competition for mobile capital and ex ante harmonization via interaction in political sphere. In both cases the paper points out potential positive and negative features of the processes from the point of view of institutional transformation. The influence of institutional competition is ambiguous, as both factors of “demand for good institutions” and “demand for bad institutions” influence corporate behaviour. The ex ante harmonization is much less influential and seems to be most successful in preserving semi-authoritarian regimes from potential competitors and therefore supports inefficient equilibrium. Finally, the paper focuses on interaction between ex ante and ex post harmonization, i.e. demand for harmonization from businesses and support of institutional competition environment from the governments. For the governments ex post harmonization could be an attractive way to avoid long and costly bargaining: this factor is probably relevant for the current support of business expansion of Russian corporations by Russian government. For the businesses the situation is more difficult: since historically post- Soviet business did not express significant interest in formal integration (associated with ex ante harmonization), the paper discusses three variables (lobbying, changes in market structure and preferences of the demand side) able to influence their decisions.Institutional convergence, institutional competition, regionalization