In December 2007, the Institute for the Economy in Transition (IET) carried out a survey of Russian industrial enterprises to identify their perceived constraints to successful economic development. Senior managers of enterprises were asked to answer 2 groups of questions and to assess: 1)...

The paper examines ways to expand the contribution of the Armenian diaspora to Armenia’s long-term development agenda. It identifies factors that could explain the involvement and dynamics of a small group of entrepreneurs from the diaspora who have been active in and with Armenia. Based on...

The paper documents how Nigeria’s public financial system stacks up against international standards, the better to see current institutions and their capacities in a wider perspective. It uses Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) framework for analysing the Nigeria's systems...

The paper deals with two issues. First, it focuses on the analysis of Armenia’s trade performance based on the utilization of standard statistical models and develops comparative estimates of this performance relative to the peer countries. The comparison is undertaken in terms of trade...

Summary The paper argues that governments in regions that rely heavily on intergovernmental transfers and natural resource rents face serious distortions in their incentive structure. As a result, such regions tend to have more fiscally centralized governments than the regional characteristics...

The paper provides empirical analysis of the relationship between fiscal decentralisation and the quality of public services in the Russian regions. The analysis suggests that fiscal decentralisation has no significant effect on the key inputs into secondary education, such as schools,...

To shed light on decentralization in Russia, the authors examine intergovernmental fiscal relations within regions. To analyze trends, they review channels of fiscal allocation within regions - tax sharing and local transfer schemes. To evaluate the potential impact of various fiscal...

Subsidies funded by Russia's regional governments represented about 5.2 percent of GDP in 1995, almost triple the 2 percent of GDP in subsidies funded by the federal government. Regional policies vary greatly, influenced more by local factors than by the federal government. To find out what...

The objective of the work is the analysis of the impact of grants, allocated from the central government budget for the expenditures of regional budgets, and the “sticker” effect, which means a traditional disproportion between the federal transfers and the amount of regional expenditure. In...