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...

The concepts of absorptive capacity and innovative capability have been introduced to describe abilities of a country to imitate and, accordingly, to create more advanced technologies. In this paper we suggest new indicators of these two abilities. To calculate them, we develop an endogenous...

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...

Two myths have harmed many economies throughout the world. One is the theory of absolute advantage of central planning over the market mechanism, and the other is the belief that efficient markets develop spontaneously and quickly enough if appropriate economic legislation is established....

We propose an evolutionary equation and develop an asymptotic theory that generalize results obtained in Polterovich, Khenkin, 1988. It is shown that, as a result of interaction between innovation and imitation, the shape of the efficiency distribution curve of technologies eventually...

This paper studies the evolution of the distribution of firms in the ferrous metals industry by efficiency levels. The proposed model takes into account interaction of processes of creation and adoption of technologies and depreciation of assets. It is shown that the model approximates real data...

A simple model of imitation and innovation is developed to explain a complicated picture of relative productivity growth in different countries. The model makes difference between global and local innovations and does not assume that a country always imitates the most advanced technology. It is...

A simple model of technological imitation and innovation is developed to explain club convergence in the evolution of the distribution of per-capita GDP over countries. Two versions of the model are studied and compared. The first one includes only innovation-imitation tradeoff, and the second...

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.

We propose a difference-differential equation that reflects interactions between innovation and imitation processes to describe the evolution of the distribution curve of firms by efficiency levels. An explicit solution of this equation is obtained for arbitrary finite initial conditions. It is...