Is Russia really a normal country? A numerical taxonomy of Russia in comparative perspective

A Normal Country: Russia After Communism

D uring the 1990s, Russia underwent extraordinary transformations. It changed from a communist dictatorship into a multiparty democracy in which officials are chosen in regular elections. Its centrally planned economy was reshaped into a capitalist order based on markets and private property. Its army withdrew peacefully from eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, allowing the latter t...

Whither Russia? A Review of Andrei Shleifer’s A Normal Country

Transition from central planning to market is one of the most important events in modern economic history. Apart from the fact that transition changed lives of more than a billion people in almost thirty countries, it had and continues to have an important effect on the economics profession. Transition provides academic economists with an unprecedented opportunity to put many propositions of ec...

A Perspective on Fiscal Federalism in Russia

Fiscal Federalism in Russia: a Canadian Perspective

This paper considers the key instrumental components of intergovernmental fiscal relations in the Russian Federation – expenditures, revenues, transfers, borrowing, and institutional arrangements – in comparison both to Canada’s lengthy experience with federalism and to a framework developed on the basis of previous work on fiscal federalism in a variety of transitional and developing countries. .

Returns to schooling in Russia and Ukraine: A semiparametric approach to cross-country comparative analysis

Measuring the returns to schooling over an extended period in Russia and Ukraine from 1985 to 2002, we find an increase in both countries but the increase is much bigger in Russia than in Ukraine. To investigate why returns to schooling in Russia and Ukraine diverged over the transition period while the skill composition of employment did not, we compare the Mincerian earnings functions between...