During the ongoing post-communist economic transitions, the relative well-being of many people is changing rapidly, and governments are not well positioned to accurately measure individual living standards. Under such circumstances, continued price controls over basic consumer goods within the...

This paper considers the Russian privatization process through the end of voucher privatization and examines how its deviation from the competitive sale standard was likely to affect wealth inequality. While empirical evaluation is all but impossible due to the dearth of reliable data, it is...

This note argues that the most commonly used estimates of the size of the unofficial economies in the former Soviet republics are flawed. Most important, they are based on calculations that disregard the variation in unofficial economic activity across space in the pre-transition Soviet Union....

The reform era in Russia has been marked by a massive increase in reported crime, including organized crime. The purpose of this paper is to look more closely at the interaction between crime and economic reform measures. Widespread economic crime in the old system paved the way for the removal...