Leaving state sector employment in Russia

I analyse the reallocation of labour and human capital from the state sector to the non‐state sector and non‐employment in Russia. I use a nationally representative household dataset, the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, to study sectoral mobility in early transition using summary measures of mobility and multivariate discrete choice models. The results show that sectoral mobility varies between different skill groups, and in particular that those with university education, with supervisory responsibility and in white‐collar occupations are less likely to leave state jobs for both non‐state employment and non‐employment. The results suggest that in the early stages of transition in Russia mismatch of skills across state/non‐state employment was significant and that non‐state employment consisted mostly of low skill, ‘bad’ jobs.     

我国政府投资与民间投资的发展演变

政府投资对拉动我国经济增长在历史上曾经起到了积极作用,但也产生了许多消极影响.随着民营经济的发展,它在推动经济增长中的主导地位日益降低,并逐步被民间投资取代.民间投资具有巨大的潜力和明显的优势,它的发展对于推动增长、扩大内需、增加就业、提高人民的收入,将起到积极的作用.本文分析了政府投资和民间投资的发展变化现状、趋势,提出了促进民间投资的有关措施.     

Public sector performance measurement and stakeholder support

Over the past several decades there has been dramatically increased attention paid to measuring the performance of public sector and nonprofit organizations in the United States and elsewhere. Recent research has indicated that public sector and nonprofit organizations are responsive to performance measurement in both productive and unproductive ways. However, it is not yet known how stakeholders respond to this measurement. This paper makes use of a unique panel survey dataset of the population of elementary and middle schools in the state of Florida to directly investigate this question. We exploit the fact that Florida changed its school grading system in 2002 and study the degree to which private contributions to schools are responsive to the information contained in school grades. We find evidence that school grades can have substantial effects on a school's ability to obtain private contributions. We also observe that schools serving different clienteles are treated differently in response to changes in school grades.     

New forms of labour contract and labour flexibility in Russia

This paper assesses the claims that employment in the new Russian private sector relies heavily on informal and unregistered labour agreements and that the violation of existing labour law by new private employers is driven by their need for more flexible working arrangements.
The paper shows that these claims are unsupported on every count. The new private sector does not rely heavily on informal or illegal forms of employment and there is no evidence that it uses labour more flexibly, in any of the usual senses of the term, than the traditional sectors of the economy. The conclusion is that there is no economic justification for the systematic violation of the existing labour legislation. It is suggested, therefore, that enforcement of the existing law is a precondition for its effective reform in those areas in which it might be a barrier to restructuring.     

Incidence,effects, dynamics and routes out of overqualification in Europe: a comprehensive analysis distinguishing by employment status

This study aims to improve our understanding of overqualification by incorporating distinctions in employment status (i.e. self-employed workers, private employees and public employees) in the analysis of the incidence, effects, dynamics and routes out of overqualification. To this end, we apply discrete choice – ordered and nonordered – and count models to the data obtained from the European Community Household Panel for the EU-15. Our results indicate that the incidence of overqualification varies by employment status, where self-employed workers report the lowest occurrence. Furthermore, this analysis suggests that overqualification is a permanent phenomenon and demonstrates that successful pathways out of overqualification differ by employment status. The implications of these results for education and labour market policies are also discussed.     

民营中小企业吸纳就业能力研究

民营经济是吸纳国有企业下岗职工和社会新增劳动力的主要载体。在目前新型城镇化快速发展过程中,大批农村劳动力流入城镇就业,民营中小企业成为吸纳农民工的主要载体,增强中小民营企业的生产经营规模和经济实力,为农民工提供更多的就业岗位,成为解决农民工城市就业的主要路径。     

规模经济、人民币汇率与民营企业进出口——兼论民营企业进出口的影响因素

分析了包括规模经济、汇率在内的影响我国民营企业进出口的主要因素。结论认为,人民币升值导致其出口下降,但进口反而减少,人民币升值对民营企业的负面影响较大;随着民营企业规模的扩大,其进出口规模也在增加;2004年贸易经营权的放开对民营企业出口没有明显的刺激效应,但对进口有明显影响;研发支出增加对民营企业出口没有明显影响,但对进口有正面影响;人均国民收入的增加和民营企业进出口没有太大关系。     

Privatization, insider control and managerial entrenchment in Russia

This paper provides new survey evidence on managerial entrenchment and the role of outsiders in the post-privatization restructuring of Russian enterprises. The major findings are that managers are hostile towards outside ownership, and they effectively collude with other employees to preserve insider control. The paper also provides empirical evidence that the gradual accumulation of shares by managers is not based only on a profit motive, but is also driven by their efforts to preserve insider control. The issues raised have relevance to other transition economies where the privatization process has encouraged insider control, such as Ukraine and Belarus.     

江浙模式及民营经济在全国的发展

Along with the implementation of reform and open up policy in China, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, two provinces have got rapid economic development and greatly contributed to China’s market transition. Jiangsu, Zhejiang together with Shanghai, have shaped China’s economic heartland—the Yangtze River Delta Economic Region. Undoubtedly, the private sector is the driving force for the tremendous economic development in the Yangtze River Delta, particularly for facilitating institutional transition and economic development. Fortunately, this kind of economic development driven by the private sector was not only restricted in the Yangtze River Delta Region, but also across the country as it has been gradually extended nationwide. This paper is to look at the development of the private sector in Jiangsu and Zhejiang areas and particularly trace its fantastic effects on nationwide economic development and market transition.      

Human Capital, Growth, and Inequality in Russia

Our model captures the fact that Russia has both much human capital and an education system that produces the wrong skills for a market economy. We define a rule for the timing of educational restructuring that is Pareto optimal and that dominates all later times in a Paretian sense while simultaneously reducing inequality. We demonstrate that failure to implement restructuring early in the transition process is likely to produce a very long delay that will significantly reduce Russia's human capital. A retreat from subsidizing public education is likely to be counterproductive. We argue that early educational restructuring should be emphasized in Russia's transition strategy. J. Comp. Econom., December 1999, 27(4), pp. 618–643. Lingnan University, Tuen Mun, N.T., Hong Kong, People's Republic of China; University of Colorado, Denver, Denver, Colorado 88217; and Royal Holloway College, University of London, Egham, Surrey TW20 OEX, United Kingdom.     

Urban unemployment, informal sector and development policies

We analyze the effects of wage subsidy policies on unemployment and welfare in the model that is characterized by the existence of both open unemployment and the informal sector that producesfinal goods. Our main findings are as follows. Wage subsidies to the agricultural and informal sectors increase welfare and decrease urban unemployment. The effects of a wage subsidy to manufacturing sector on welfare and unemployment are conditional. We identify some sufficient conditions for the definite results and interpret them.     

Measuring conditional cooperation: a replication study in Russia

We replicate the strategy-method experiment by Fischbacher et al. (Econ. Lett. 71:397–404, 2001) developed to measure attitudes towards cooperation in a one-shot public goods game. We collected data from 160 students at four different universities across urban and rural Russia. Using the classification proposed by Fischbacher et al. (2001) we find that the distribution of types is very similar across the four locations. The share of conditional cooperators in our Russian subject pools is comparable to the one found by Fischbacher et al. in a Swiss subject pool. However, the distribution of the other types differs from the one found in Switzerland.     

浅析俄罗斯利益集团发展演变、类型和策略

利益集团问题是一个跨经济学、政治学和法学领域的课题。在苏联解体后二十多年的经济社会转轨中,政治和经济的变革对俄罗斯的社会组织方式产生了深远的影响。与前苏联相比,俄罗斯现在有名目繁多的各种类型利益集团,它们在俄罗斯政治、经济活动中产生着不同的影响。就俄罗斯利益集团的发展演变、类型种类和策略做一简要阐述与分析。     

Worksharing,access and bypass: the structure of prices in the postal sector

This paper studies a liberalized postal market where entrants may offer end-to-end products or concentrate on one of the segments of the network. Absent effective bypass, entry does not appear to be a serious financial threat to the incumbent, even when the products are perfect substitutes. This is no longer true when the entrant offers cheaper service in delivery. Then, the universal service provider may loose the entire pre-sorted mail market. It is left with probably low volume demand from households and from firms with high preparation cost, and its financial viability may be jeopardized. This paper has been presented at 13th CRRI Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics, June 2005.     

The employment effect of changes in the composition of fiscal consolidations

This paper assesses the magnitude and nature of fiscal consolidation policies and their impact on employment. In particular, in an attempt to address fiscal imbalances in the near term, countries have been faced with the delicate challenge of doing so without damaging recovery prospects and thus, counter to their original aim, worsening further public finances. In this regard, the paper reviews recent austerity measures adopted by governments and discusses how prolonging fiscal consolidation measures in their current form could be counterproductive for guaranteeing debt sustainability. Moreover, the article shows how poorly designed fiscal cuts – directly or indirectly affecting labour – seem to have been dampening job prospects. The paper sheds light on how fiscal and employment goals can be achieved together. More specifically, it finds that a fiscally-neutral change in the expenditure and revenue composition of fiscal consolidation can boost job creation. In this sense, the paper shows that it is imperative to find the right policy mix and recommends countries to be mindful of the nature and pace of consolidation.     

Informality,public employment and employment protection in developing countries

This paper proposes an equilibrium matching model for developing countries’ labor markets where the interaction between public, formal private and informal private sectors are taken into account. Theoretical analysis shows that gains from reforms aiming at liberalizing formal labor markets can be annulled by shifts in the public sector employment and wage policies. Since the public sector accounts for a substantial share of employment in developing countries, this approach is crucial to understand the main labor market outcomes of such economies. Wages offered by the public sector increase the outside option value of the workers during the bargaining processes in the formal and informal sectors. It becomes more profitable for workers to search on-the-job, in order to move to these more attractive and more stable types of jobs. The public sector therefore acts as an additional tax for the formal private firms. Using data on workers’ flows from Egypt, we show empirically and theoretically that the liberalization of labor markets plays against informal employment by increasing the profitability, and hence job creations, of formal jobs. The latter effect is however dampened or even sometimes nullified by the increase of the offered wages in the public sector observed at the same time.     

Regulation of entry, labor market institutions and the informal sector

This paper develops a two-sector matching model that incorporates the main features of Latin American labor markets. It has an innovation in its matching structure that makes it more consistent with some key stylized facts of the informal sector in these countries. The model is numerically solved using Brazilian data and several policy simulations are performed. Reducing formal sector's entry cost significantly reduces the size of the informal sector and improves overall labor market performance. Increasing enforcement significantly reduces informality but has strong adverse effects on unemployment and welfare. Thus, the results indicate that the tradeoff between lower informal employment and higher unemployment rates is not present when one looks at policies that aim at reducing the costs of being formal, as opposed to policies that simply increase the costs of being informal.     

俄罗斯经济全球化发展的进程、现状及反思

经济全球化是当今世界经济发展大势所趋.俄罗斯从解体至今,经济的发展历程艰难曲折,如今经济进入了增长阶段,已经融入到世界经济全球化体系当中.研究与探索俄罗斯经济全球化发展的进程、现状,对我国的经济建设实践有着重要的借鉴意义.     

The participation of Russian households in the informal economy: Evidence from the VTsIOM data

This study presents the size and structure of secondary employment in Russia, analyses the determinants of Russian informal secondary employment, and discusses differences between job qualifications in a main job and those in a secondary job. We estimate that 27 percent of Russia’s GDP was produced in the informal economy during 1997–98 and informal secondary employment amounts to about 20 percent of value added produced in the informal economy. We found that the probability of holding an informal secondary job as opposed to a formal one is positively associated with higher wage rates and lower education. However, there is little evidence that low income is correlated with holding an informal secondary job. We also found evidence that an informal secondary job requires lower job qualifications as compared to a formal one. Again, low income is not significant in determining differences between job qualifications in a main job and those in a secondary job. JEL classification: J22, J24, O17, P20.