It is shown that, at the stage of catching-up development, regional economic development agencies (REDA) might become the most important elements of the growth control system. Basic tasks of REDA are considered including their role as 1) organizers of interaction among government, business...

The costs and benefits of privatization are considered, focusing on the current Russian conditions. The experience of many countries, as well as econometric and theoretical studies, a review of which is given in the paper, show that relative efficiency of privatized enterprises in comparison...

Recent literature on international trade has established that the most productive firms become multinationals. But our data reveal a startling variation in productivity levels of foreign affiliates across the countries in Eastern Europe of the same European multinational parent firms suggesting...

In this paper, it is shown that the concept “economic imperialism” has no real content with epistemological point of view: there is no evidence of using specific economic methodology in areas of other social disciplines. Economics is in a permanent crisis caused by the impossibility to...

The theory of institutional traps, i.e. ineffective but stable institutions or behavior norms, is develope din connection with economic reforms. Mechanisms are described that cause a system to get into a trap and ways of going out of it are analyzed. Concepts of transformation costs and...

In our previous papers (Polterovich V., Popov V., 2007; Polterovich V., Popov V., Tonis A., 2006) it was shown that democratization (increase in the political rights index of the Freedom house in 1970-2000) can negatively affect economic growth, if the quality of institutions at the beginning of the...

In this paper we analyze the conditions under which a foreign direct investment (FDI) involves a net capital flow across countries. For this purpose, we investigate how multinational firms finance their foreign affiliates, globally or locally. We develop a contract theoretical model in which the...

The paper investigates how barter can be used to finance imports and restore the creditworthiness of highly indebted countries when reputation as an enforcement mechanism for credit repayment does not work. The authors argue that payments in goods can be used to collateralize a trade credit and...

Recent years have witnessed an enormous amount of reorganization of the corporate sector in the United States and Europe. This article examines the role of market competition in this trend of corporate reorganization. We find that, at intermediate levels of competition, the CEO of the...