Constitutions, regulations, and taxes: Contradictions of different aspects of decentralization

Abstract

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. It finds virtually no correlation between different decentralization aspects; moreover, three processes of devolution appearing in the same country at the same time seem to be driven by different (though partly overlapping) forces. Hence, a specific aspect of decentralization is hardly able to serve as a proxy for another one or for the overall decentralization process.

Strategic Tax Collection and Fiscal Decentralization: The Case of Russia

“…Second, we conduct panel regressions, where we interact tax arrears with individual year dummies instead of Putin (or Putin and Yeltsin) dummies. Third, we estimate a pooled cross‐sectional specification (Newey–West standard errors) without fixed effects using OLS and median regressions, adding a set of time‐invariant controls suggested by the literature (see Libman, ); we also include a dummy variable for two regions – Tatarstan and Bashkortostan for the reasons discussed above…”

“…We also include control variables capturing political bargaining power and preferences of the regional elite vis‐à‐vis the federal centre. The set of political variables applied is fairly standard in the literature dealing with the decentralization in Russia and is mostly derived from Libman (), corrected by the fact that we use a fixed‐effects specification and therefore do not include time‐invariant variables. We control for (1) the economic potential of the region captured by the population and the size of oil and gas extraction (the latter is expressed in coal equivalents to make the energy value of oil and gas extracted comparable); (2) the size of fiscal transfers from the federal budget and (3) the heterogeneity of preferences of a particular region vis‐à‐vis the rest of the federation captured by urbanization and the Carnegie Center index of the democratization of the regional political systems.…”

Effects of subnational regional corruption on growth strategies in emerging economies: Evidence from Russian domestic and international M&A activity

“…Russia is politically organized into 83 federal regions (called federal subjects) that differ significantly in terms of their economic development, industrial structure, population, and institutional attributes (Dininio & Orttung, 2005). The diversity in regional institutional regimes stems from the political arrangements that were chosen after the breakup of the Soviet Union combined with substantial variance in the regions' initial conditions (Gelman & Ryzhenkov, 2011;Libman, 2010). These differences are reflected in the country's corruption activity: although corruption is generally widespread in Russia, it tends to vary strongly across regions (Dininio & Orttung, 2005).…”

Russian Federalism and Post-Soviet Integration: Divergence of Development Paths

“…First, as already mentioned, they designed unilaterally their acts and regulations (including the regional constitutions, see Libman, 2008) in a way often contradicting the federal legislation. In a similar way, multiple power sharing agreements they signed with the federal government and its agencies often went beyond the constitutional provisions.…”