One of the main obstacles for successful economic development is the formation of institutional traps, inefficient yet stable norms of behaviour. Domination of barter exchange, arrears, corruption and black market activities are examples of institutional traps that have hampered reforms in...

The Russian labor market was characterized with three main features: a weak sensitivity of employment levels to changing conditions, a high variability of wage, large inter-firm flows of labor resources. This paper recommends a model of a collective firm explaining these phenomena. The main...

Transplantation of institutions is an important part of reforms in many developing and transition economies. However, principles and methods of transplantation are not developed and therefore many transplantation attempts failed. This is a case for numerous projects of accelerated building the...

The economic "battle" that took place in Russia in 1992 consisted of the struggle between the liberally-oriented government and the labor collectives, the latter of which regarded the government's reform program as an attempt to encroach upon the established system of collective property. The...

We discuss the typical mistakes in carrying out reforms that promote redistributive activities and give rise to redistribution cycles; each cycle includes the stages of reform, stabilization and recovery. We provide arguments that show that a possible way out of the institutional backwardness...

In this paper we try to describe the main feature of Russian civic culture that could influence the outcome of the reform, initiated in 1992, and discuss channels through which the influence was realized. We begin with consideration of paternalism and what we call “habitual deviationism”,...

An attempt is made to define main problems of the privatization theory and to present a survey of some results in this area. Two models are discussed that demonstrate paradoxical consequences of property right restrictions and dynamics of property right redistribution which entails a...

Any legislative framework is likely to generate different institutions or norms of behavior which the legislator occasionally could have never foreseen. I suggested a general pattern, on which inefficient, if stable, norms or institutions called institutional traps would form.

If imperfect market institutions prevail in a country and inflation amounts to about 10% then efforts directed to further inflation decrease would probably hamper economic growth. To substantiate this thesis, I make references on opinions of well-known economists, discuss results of recent...

Different approaches to the formation of a National Innovation System (NIS) are discussed. In Russia, the current attempts of creating NIS resemble "shock therapy" whereas an interim institution strategy could be more fruitful. At the initial stage, such a strategy has to provide creation of...