Publications in "Post-Soviet Affairs"

4 articles by the ICSID research fellows and associate fellows were published online at the end of June in the "Post-Soviet Affairs". This special double issue of the journal was drawn from presentations at an international research seminar held at UAE University (Al Ain, UAE) and at New York University Abu Dhabi. This seminar was organized in cooperation with the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development (ICSID) in 2018.

Michael Rochlitz, Anton Kazun, Andrei Yakovlev: "Property rights in Russia after 2009: from business capture to centralized corruption?"
Abstract: Since about 2009, increasing budgetary constraints forced the Russian state to become notably less tolerant of lower-level corruption and predatory behavior by state agencies. In this paper, we argue that after a first stage of decentralized corruption and state capture during the 1990s, and a second period of decentralized corruption and business capture during the 2000s, Russia has entered a third stage of more centralized corruption since 2009. We build our argument on a detailed discussion of property rights relations in Russia, and support it with indicative quantitative data, suggesting that raiding attacks on businesses and corrupt behavior by state agencies have become less frequent and more centralized between 2009 and 2016. The sustainability of this move towards a more centralized mode of corruption remains questionable, however, mainly due to the lack of a long-term vision for the development of the country.

Thomas F. Remington, Po Yang: "Public-private partnerships for skill development in the United States, Russia, and China"
Abstract: We compare three countries where public policy has explicitly sought to align incentives of employers and educational institutions around closing the gap between skill formation and labor market demand. In large, heterogeneous countries such as the United States, Russia and China, collaborative arrangements such apprenticeships and other forms of public-private partnerships can be constructed at the subnational level by building on direct, face-to-face ties across educational, business, government, and civic sectors. Drawing on existing literature as well as fieldwork studying a number of specific cases in the three countries, the paper develops a typology of such arrangements and proposes an explanation for the observed variation. It emphasizes the importance of two sets of factors: those that induce cooperation on the part of firms and schools, and those that influence the character of such partnerships.

Guzel Garifullina, Kirill Kazantcev, Andrei Yakovlev: "United we stand: the effects of subnational elite structure on succession in two Russian regions"
Abstract: In this paper, we build a theory that presents the process of succession at the subnational level as bargaining between the region and the center. The region should first be able to produce qualifying candidates for successor status, which requires incumbent control. If potential successors emerge and one is designated as such by the incumbent, the central authorities still need to accept such a candidate as the new leader. The center’s strength (depending on the level of centralization) and the region’s strength (depending on regional elite cohesion) shape this negotiation. Using biographical data on subnational political elites in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan in the 1990s and 2000s, we construct elite social networks and demonstrate how and why we observe leader succession in Tatarstan in 2010, but not in Bashkortostan.

Anton Kazun: "Stopping the feast in times of plague: fighting criminal corporate raiding in diverse Russian regions"
Abstract: This paper analyzes the process of renegotiation of the informal contract between the regional and federal elites of Russia after the economic crisis. We use the database of Center of Public Procedures’ “Business against Corruption” to show that, after 2011, regional elites in Russia lost the pre-existing opportunity to extract rents from businesses in return for favorable election results for Vladimir Putin and United Russia. We also analyze the connection between the level of corporate raiding in various Russian regions and the political competition, tenure, and ties of their governors. We show that there are two distinct models for fighting raiding in a region: an authoritarian model for suppressing negative signals and a competitive model with the creation of a new consensus among the elites. Although both models are similar in terms of the absence of negative signals, they have very different consequences in the business context of an area.