Fiscal federalism in Russia: a critique of the OECD proposals

The OECD proposes to kill two birds with one stone in Russiaby simultaneously improving fiscal federalism, and using thefinancial reform process to press for full market liberalisation.This paper scrutinises the initiative and finds it wanting becausethe consensus reforms advocated conflate the re-centralisationof fiscal authority with optimal ownership, property rightsand effective market building, perpetuating the illusion thatthere are no bad market systems. The G-7 and Putin must do better.Yeltsin's mis-privatisation and mis-liberalisation, which spawnedrent seeking, asset stripping, asset seizing and a disregardfor profit maximising from current operations, have proved tobe path dependent and need to be rectified. Putin's increasinglyvisible efforts to rein private property rights must also betaken into account in designing on optimal fiscal federalistregime.     

Prospects for Japanese-Russian trade expansion in the second half of the 1990s

During the Soviet period, trade between the USSR and Japan was relatively unimportant, constituting approximately 2 percent of the Soviet Union's total foreign trade turnover. The composition of trade goods, moreover, was primitive. The USSR exported unprocessed raw materials in exchange for high value added industrial products. This paper examines the impact of Russia's fledgling transition on its trade with Japan and finds some hopeful developments. Although the volume of trade has contracted, Russian exports are reviving, the commodity structure is adjusting appropriately to changes in relative prices, and embodied factor content is import-capital-intensive as required by the Leontief variant of the Heckscher-Ohlin theory. The primary cloud blighting this performance is Russia's continuing inability to export its industrial goods.     

Retreat from utopia: The reconfiguration of Russian socialism

Although it has been fashionable to assert since the late eighties that Russia is in transition from administrative command planning to capitalism, close analysis reveals that this is hardly the case. Soviet and now Russian leaders have been trying throughout to retain state economic control while harnessing the market for their own public and private ends. In doing so, they have only succeeded in creating a bastard form of socialism that has simultaneously endogenized hyper-inflation, acute depression, suppressed competition, spawn-microeconomic disorder, and kleptocracy. The outlook for the future is more of the same. The research underlying this paper was supported by a grant from the Abe Foundation, the Japan Foundation Center for Global Partnership, the Social Science Research Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies. The author wishes to express his appreciation to all these institutions.