The paper explores various measures of institutional quality in Russian regions, and compares those measures to each other. Such analysis leads to the conclusion that Russian regional institutions are essentially multidimensional, and therefore comparisons of Russian regions in terms of their overall institutional quality could be problematic. New institutional indices are derived from Russian enterprise surveys held under the BEEPS project of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. Such indices yield economy and bureaucracy in their regions. Dynamics of regional institutional indices is investigated against the backdrop of Russia-wide institutional trends. reserved.: D73, D78, H73, H83, O17.

The paper explores various measures of institutional quality in Russian regions, and compares those measures to each other. Such analysis leads to the conclusion that Russian regional institutions are essentially multidimensional, and therefore comparisons of Russian regions in terms of their overall institutional quality could be problematic. New institutional indexes are derived from Russian enterprise surveys held under the BEEPS project of the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development. Such indexes yield a typology of Russian regions in terms of efficacy of regional administrations’ control over economy and bureaucracy in their regions. Dynamics of regional institutional indexes is investigated against the backdrop of Russia-wide institutional trends.

No abstract

Private ownership confers numerous benefits, including stronger performance incentives, better use of privately owned assets, and improved access to finance. We argue that privately owned land could be both an asset and a liability, and overall net benefits of land ownership are contingent on the quality of surrounding institutions. We present a simple model and empirical evidence based on the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) in Russia, which clearly demonstrates such conditionality in the case of land ownership by Russian industrial firms. Consistently with earlier literature, land ownership facilitates firms' access to finance (the "de Soto effect"), but at the same time entails additional risks and obstacles to doing business. When the quality of property rights protection and other key institutions is poor, land ownership could have an adverse effect on firms' performance.

This paper is the first attempt at quantitative and qualitative analysis of the Soviet literature on general equilibrium theory in 1960-1990s. We divide the papers into four subgroups: von Neumann-Gale class of models and equilibrium growth; Arrow-Debreu class of models; disequilibrium theory; other branches of general equilibrium theory. Bibliometric analysis shows that von Neumann-Gale class of models was the most popular one in the Soviet mathematical economics.