Carol S. Leonard

Rational Resistance to Land Privatization: The Response of Rural Producers to Agrarian Reforms in Pre- and Post-Soviet Russia

A UK-based economist and historian adapts the Fernandez-Rodrik model to demonstrate how rural opposition to land reform in present-day Russia is a consequence of individually rational decisions by members of former state and collective farms regarding whether to support further land reform or preserve the status quo (collective farming), given widespread uncertainties regarding the costs and benefits of private fanning. The paper also explores historical parallels to the present situation during the post-Emancipation and Stolypin eras, when peasant communes resisted enclosures and restructuring of rights to land, in part as a consequence of the unclear nature of property rights. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: N00, O13, Q15. 37 references.

The rural/urban wage gap in the industrialisation of Russia, 1884–1910

This article presents econometric evidence of integration in rural and urban wages in Russias Northwest in the late tsarist era. Using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach to co-integration and error correction modelling, we show the flexibility of the rural wage in response to the lagged rural/urban wage ratio. Applying the model developed by Boyer and Hatton (1994) and Hatton and Williamson (1991a, 1991b, 1992), we show the similarity of the wage gap in northwest Russia in the late tsarist era to that during industrialisation in the US, England and Western Europe. Although our evidence does not necessarily describe countrywide trends, it does support for an industrialising region the more positive view of the degree and nature of late tsarist economic growth. Growth was not slowing down, and there is little evidence of constraints on migration by traditional agrarian institutions.

Population and Living Standards, 1870-1914

This chapter provides the first all-European overview of diverse aspects of living standards in a period when industrialisation and modernity began to show up in substantial improvements in general living conditions. Most obvious is this seen in the increase of life expectancy. A substantial contribution came from the decline in infant mortality which occurred almost simultaneously over large parts of Europe, despite levels were very different. An explanation is suggested for bot the similarity in the change and the difference in levels. Other treated aspects of living standards consider urbanisation with sanitary systems, income distribution and an application of the Human Development Index.

The Impact of Sub‐National Institutions

This paper assesses the effect of sub‐national institutions on the economic performance of Russias regions (oblasts, republics, krais and okrugs) from 2001 to 2008, a period of rapid economic advancement and recentralization. Approximating sub‐national institutions with the RA Expert index of investment risk, we find that a reduction in investment risk by one standard deviation increases output by 1.4 percent in the short run and 11.9 percent in the long run, suggesting a substantial regional performance gap in government practices, despite intensive political recentralization. Assuming that the main components of effective governance are running satisfactory public health programmes aimed at decreasing overall mortality among the working‐age population, creating fair labour market conditions and improving the regional institutional climate to encourage investment in fixed assets, we argue that sub‐national institutions remain important for growth in post‐Soviet Russia after 2000. This paper contributes to the literature on institutional persistence.

Agrarian Reform in Russia

This book examines the history of reforms and major state interventions affecting Russian agriculture: the abolition of serfdom in 1861, the Stolypin reforms, the NEP, the Collectivization, Khrushchev reforms, and finally farm enterprise privatization in the early 1990s. It shows a pattern emerging from a political imperative in imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet regimes, and it describes how these reforms were justified in the name of the national interest during severe crises - rapid inflation, military defeat, mass strikes, rural unrest, and/or political turmoil. It looks at the consequences of adversity in the economic environment for rural behavior after reform and at long-run trends. It has chapters on property rights, rural organization, and technological change. It provides a new database for measuring agricultural productivity from 1861 to 1913 and updates these estimates to the present. This book is a study of the policies aimed at reorganizing rural production and their effectiveness in transforming institutions.

A virtual community in transition, a Russian social science and humanities network

This article is about evolving patterns of participation in an electronically-supported network organised in 1999 in Russia for research scholars in the social sciences and humanities (the Russian Social Science and Humanities Network, RSSH.Net). The service provides search, databases, discussion and information services for a world-wide academic community interested in Russian studies. Its users are located in Russia, the FSU, Central and Eastern European countries and in the US, EU, Japan and China. The analysis draws on data from the log of the Web service, describing senders and their messages by monthly data for 28 months, 1999-2002. The results show stable participation, predominantly by Russian users, among whom messaging activity is highly concentrated as well as localised in the Moscow regions subscribers. The usage of the RSSH.Net for messaging is somewhat lower, but still roughly within the same range as that found in comparable networks based in the US.

Russian Regional Resilience: Finance, Cooperation and Resource Abundance (A Case Study of Khanty-Mansiysk)

This paper, part of a larger project on governance and growth in Russia, examines regional financial resilience in Russia in the period following the global financial crisis. The level of risk is rising, as government emergency finance is withdrawn and regions face rising debt to cover even operational expenses, but “resource” regions seem securely well off, despite having been most affected by the financial crisis. This paper examines one region, Khanty-Mansiysk autonomous okrug (KhMAO), the largest “donor” to the federal budget, against the background of other mineral resource abundant regions. It traces developments since the dramatic budget reforms (late 1990s through 2005), including centralization of revenues and rationalized program expenditure (Alexeev and Weber 2013). It assesses regional budget and debt management in response to pressures from increased federal required expenditures, post-crisis withdrawal of subsidies, and the roll-out of new debt guidelines. It describes and explains KhMAO’s stability and relative autonomy in these crisis conditions. The key questions are: Why are these “donor” regions, more affected by the crisis than others, also more resilient? Is Russia’s growth core of regions financially stable because of federal intervention? How vulnerable is the resource region to future oil price shocks? Our findings are tentative, since there remain questions about transparency and soft budget constraints (Plekhanov 2006). We show federalism at its most cooperative: among other factors, regional collaborative action fosters flexible budgeting.

Russia’s regions: governance and Well-being, 2000-2008

This paper assesses the impact of the quality of governance on economic performance in Russia’s 83 regions (Oblasts, Republics, Krais and Okrugs) from 2000 to 2008, a period of rapid economic advancement. Defining governance broadly as how authority is exercised, and using as a proxy a measure of the investment risk by region, this paper contributes to the literature on identifying the economic impact of governance. Our results find a significant association between governance in Russia’s diverse regions and economic well-being, that is, we find a performance gap in government practices. Specifically, our study shows that the main components of effective governance are the ability of the government to run effective public health programs aimed at decreasing the overall mortality rate among the working-age population, to create fair labor market conditions for all individuals who are still capable of working, and to improve the investment climate in the region leading to a higher level of investment in fixed assets. Our results implicitly suggest that effective governance comprises the tangible aspects of policymaking such as the adoption of effective public health, investment and labor policies and most importantly, for the regions of Russian Federation, although effective governance can be also an artifact of unobserved and unmeasurable managerial attributes of the local government to implement federal and region level laws and regulations

Property rights in land and output growth in Russia: Expansion periods 2001-08 and 2010-14

This paper tests whether the implementation of a key market‐oriented reform in post‐Soviet Russia, property rights in land, proxied by the percent of privatized land by region, affected the pace of sub‐national economic growth during two unprecedented expansion periods: 2001–2008 and 2010–2014. Individuals gained the Constitutional right to own land in 1993, but implementation was stalled. The pace of land privatization can be explained by arguably exogenous factors such as distance to Moscow, as well as climate and also regional political culture, proxied by concentration of votes in the 2004 presidential election. We show that this rate of land privatization in Russias regions was significantly associated with output growth in 2010–2014, confirming the policy importance of this measure for developing economies. Regions where private holdings expanded most rapidly with the enforcement of property rights in land, gained a competitive advantage in the growth process through increased investment in fixed assets and private consumption.

The Outward Dimension in Russia ’s Regional Development Strategies: A Mapping of Prospective Cooperation

There is a critical spatial component in the emerging cooperative Russian planning model for economic growth across the federation. Although in Russia, as in the EU, this spatial modeling for joint action and cooperation has not entirely displaced the older model of competitive fiscal federalism and public policy doctrine of the 1980s, the newer cooperative model, emerging from the globalization of supply chains and cross-regional externalities, encourages integration rather than competition within larger functional macro-spaces. It embraces both cross-regional and cross-national pooling of human and other resources. There has been considerable Russian research on regional integration (Shishkov, 2001; Butorina, 2011; Kolesov, 1996; Kulikov, 2002) and internationalization (Vardomskiy, 2002; Kosolapov, 2005; Belousov, 2011; Skatershchikova et al., 2002; Tsygankov, 2004). This paper contributes to the existing research by developing a new database to map the strategies of regional authorities. In this paper, we develop three case studies to show program development and implementation of bilateral and multi-lateral strategies. Our information represents a complete survey of selected regions from the material available at this time, showing design and strategy, and some implementation. Our survey is the first attempt we are aware of that traces the new cross-regional arrangements.