Intergovernmental grants in Russia

Abstract

Two hypotheses about the determinants of Russian intergovernmental grants are tested. According to the first hypothesis, federal transfers to regions correlate with recent voting behaviour of regional electorates. The second hypothesis states that transfers are higher in regions with politically powerful governors. I find a strong confirmation for the first hypothesis and no evidence for the second hypothesis for the years 1995-99. This result is robust across specifications. However, in the years 2000-2004 electoral variables show no effect on transfers. The only significant political variable is Putin's visits to regions. Copyright (c) 2010 The Author. Journal compilation (c) 2010 The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development.

Redistributive Politics in Russia: The Political Economy of Agricultural Subsidies

“…The evidence for the Russian context is not conclusive either. Popov (2004) and Jarocińska (2010) are among the scholars who find evidence that supports the "core voter" theory, as regions with a higher voting turnout for the ruling party enjoy more transfers from the federal government. Treisman (1998), on the other hand, finds that regions with more protests received more intergovernmental transfers.…”

“…In Russia, local politicians may have incentives to maximize political support for the incumbent party in order to please the party leaders at the federal level (Ross 2010). In a centralized Russian context with a highly vertically integrated structure of UR, local governments may function as extensions of the central bureaucracy with vertical intra-party accountability (Jarocińska 2010). The success of local politicians is not measured by local economic indicators, but by the loyalty to UR (Konitzer-Smirnov 2005).…”

“…For instance, penetration of business interests in local legislatures can be illustrated by the fact that just under half of the regional legislature members owned businesses in the early 2010s (Reuter 2010). However, new rules of intergovernmental fiscal relationships improved substantially under Putin's regime (Jarocińska 2010). Nevertheless, we observe a growing bulk of evidence of the federal government's maximizing political support via manipulation of transfers (Jarocińska 2010;Marques et al 2016), state lending (Schoors and Weill 2017) and tax arrears (Ponomareva and Zhuravskaya 2004).…”

“…We examine how political incentives of central and regional politicians in Russia may affect the distribution of agricultural subsidies across and within the regions. A growing body of literature suggests that within the setting of a competitively autocratic Russian regime, political actors maximize their support by redistributing state resources (Popov 2004;Jarocińska 2010;Marques et al 2016;Treisman 1998). However, all these scholars examine the motives behind the distribution of intergovernmental transfers to the regions.…”

Horizontal Imbalances of Russian Federation Budget System

“…(2005), Blanchard, O., Shleifer, A. (2001)[10], Jarocińska, E. (2010). However, further studying these issues did not lose edge.…”