Suchergebnisse

Russian Modernization: A New Paradigm är en antologi om Rysslands modernisering och presenterar resultat efter ett stort projekt som forskargruppen av 34 medverkande författare bedrivit vid Aleksanteriinstitutet under ledning av Markku Kivinen och Brendan Humphreys.
Russian Modernization: A New Paradigm presents the result of a large project about Russian modernization conducted by a research group of 34 participants at the Aleksanteri Institute under the leadership of Markku Kivinen and Brendan Humphreys.

A compromise in the name of growth: increasing public confidence in the elites in Sweden (1930s – 1960s) The paper deals with historical prerequisites and basic elements of the Swedish elite compromise as it emerged in Sweden in time of the advancement and culmination of mass production in this country between the 1930s and 1960s. A special vision of the future, namely the society of "the people's home" formulated by the Swedish social democrats in the 1930s, is under focus. The paper takes up briefly reforms introduced in subsequent decades, which transformed Sweden into one of the most affluent and economically developed nations in the world in the second half of the 20th century. It analyses the role played for the compromise by the main elite groups, including the business elites, leaders of political parties, employer organisations and trade unions, as well as by intellectual elite. The paper discusses which lessons of the Swedish experience can be of relevance for contemporary Russia. It suggests that a transition to a more justice and affluent open-access society does not necessarily entail increase in social mobility in this society, as this has been the case in Sweden. ; В статье рассматриваются исторические предпосылки и базовые элементы элитного компромисса в Швеции в эпоху распространения и расцвета массового производства в этой стране в 1930–1960-е гг. Подчеркивается роль особого видения будущего, общества "народного дома",сформулированного шведскими социал-демократами в 1930-е гг. Разбираются реформы, осуществленные в последующие десятилетия, которые превратили Швецию в одну из самых богатых и экономически развитых стран мира во второй половине ХХ в. Подвергается анализу роль основных элитных групп в этом компромиссе, включая деловые круги, руководство политических партий, организации работодателей и профсоюзов, интеллектуальную элиту. Делаются выводы об уроках элитного компромисса в Швеции для современной России. В статье выдвигается тезисо том, что переход к более справедливому и богатому обществу открытого доступа не обязательно должен сопровождаться усилением социальной мобильности в этом обществе.

The chapter introduces the reader into developments of illegal corporate raiding ("reiderstvo" in Russian) in post-Communist Russia and explains its interdependency with privatization in the 1990s and persistence of weak property rights protection that followed. It connects the issue to the concept of Russia's network state enabling understanding of how existence and interaction of informal power networks facilitate redistribution of property and economic assets. Typology of reiderstvo is presented in historical perspective and a number of empirical cases of reiderstvo from the 1990s until 2010s are discussed. In particular, the role played by representatives of security services in the state apparatus and business ("siloviki" in Russian) for increase of reiderstvo after 2000 is stressed.

The article examines how informal networks inside the Russian state influenced the formation and further development of the country's financial markets during the 1990s and 2000s. The main argument is that the activities of these networks made it difficult to implement any coherent state regulation policy in the field. At the same time, rivalry between competing informal networks and different organizations contributed to institutional development and some improvements. The result was a dualist institutional structure of the Russian speculative financial markets that reproduced itself throughout the period in question. The study is based on in-depth interviews conducted at Moscow-based financial institutions.

Interview article with Andrei Yakovlev, professor at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and head of the Institute for Industrial and Market Studies on recent tendecies. Yakovlev, a leading Russian economist, has a deepknowledge of the transformation of Russian enterprise throughout the post-Soviet time. In this interview, he puts the microeconomic perspective within a broad political economic context and evaluates the policy choices made by Russia's political elites after the Arab Spring in 2011. Although he is quite pessimistic about Russia's prospects, Yakovlev suggests that the new geopolitical situation and sanctions have created promising opportunities for the Russian economy. However, these opportunities can be used only if Russian elites achieve a new consensus regarding redistribution of economic rent.

The period of Dmitry Medvedev's presidency in 2008–2012, that is, the duumvirate of Dmitry Medvedev as president and Vladimir Putin as prime minister, is usually referred to in Russian media as tandemocratia, or "tandemocracy ". The interview describes the experience of tandemocracy for the Russian political system and takes up the main novelties inside the Russian political system and elites after 2008. It also provides some insights into Vladimir Putin's leadership during his third presidentship after 2012 election.

This article contributes to international political economy debates about the monetary power autonomy (MPA) of emerging market and developing countries (EMDs). The 2014-15 Russian financial crisis is used as a case study to explore why an accumulation of large international reserves does not provide protection against currency crises and macroeconomic adjustments in EMDs. The analysis centres on the interplay between two dimensions of MPA: the Power to Delay and the Power to Deflect adjustment costs. Two structural factors condition Russia's low MPA. First, the country's subordinated integration in global financial markets increases its financial vulnerability. The composition of external assets and liabilities, combined with cross-border capital flows, restrict the use of international reserves to delay currency crises. Second, the choice of a particular macroeconomic policy regime embraced the financialisation of the - mainly state-owned - Russian banking sector, thus making it difficult to transform liquidity inflows into credits for enterprises. Russia's main comparative advantage, hydrocarbon export revenues, is not exploited. The type of economy created due to the post-Communist transition means that provided excessive' liquidity remains in the financial system and is channelled into currency arbitrage. This factor increases exchange rate vulnerability and undermines Russia's MPA.

The editor of this book has brought together contributions designed to capture the essence of post-communist politics in East-Central Europe and Eurasia. Rather than on the surface structures of nominal democracies, the nineteen essays focus on the informal, often intentionally hidden, disguised and illicit understandings and arrangements that penetrate formal institutions. These phenomena often escape even the best-trained outside observers, familiar with the concepts of established democracies. Contributors to this book share the view that understanding post-communist politics is best served by a framework that builds from the ground up, proceeding from a fundamental social context. The book aims at facilitating a lexical convergence; in the absence of a robust vocabulary for describing and discussing these often highly complex informal phenomena, the authors wish to advance a new terminology of post-communist regimes. Instead of a finite dictionary, a kind of conceptual cornucopia is offered. The resulting variety reflects a larger harmony of purpose that can significantly expand the understanding the "real politics" of post-communist regimes. Countries analyzed from a variety of aspects, comparatively or as single case studies, include Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Hungary, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine