Explaining Post-Soviet Patchworks: The Political Economy of Regions, Regimes and Republics (Explaining Post-Soviet Patchworks, Volume 1)

Funded by the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk, this volume is part of a trilogy based around the extensive research project, Transformation and Globalization. The three volumes each contain the most relevant findings and include many researchers from post-Soviet regions. The Former Soviet Union (FSU), and especially Russia, have been re-integrated into the main current of political science and comparative research. This project suggests that we can gain new insights into post-Soviet transformations without taking refuge to dubious assumptions regarding the uniqueness of Russia. It presents powerful tools for analysing current developments in the FSU beyond day-to-day events, and it is able to put them into context. The first volume focuses on actors: state; sectoral; and transnational. Most of the studies on actors' interests have used the rational choice approach. This volume includes an introduction by the editor which uses additional material gathered by the project team on two polls, 1999 and 2000. These polls, in addition to the individual studies, provide sufficient data to obtain insights into the basic preferences and the logic of action of the main players in Russia. This study looks at large corporations, sectors such as finance and banking, internationalization, business, debt and trade. The outcomes of this research will be particularly relevant for students, researchers, journalists and decision-makers interested in Russia and the post-Soviet states, politics, international relations, economics and social policy/sociology. Contents: Institutional change in Russia: a research design; Networks, Bureaucracies, and the Russian state; Networks in Russia: global and localimplications; Markets between Soviet legacy and globalization: neoinstitutionalist perspectives on transformation; Person, position, power and property: the general director in the "economy of physical persons"; Profit or production? enterprise behaviour after privatization; Property rights, bargaining and globalization in the oil sector; The corporate securities market: bridgehead or barrier for globalization?; The institutionalization of shadow economy: rules and roles; Capital flight: causes, consequences and counter measures; Institutionalization and property rights: the reincarnation of managerial "economic authority" over state property; Institutionalization and property rights: trademark usage, specification, and enforcement; Administrative market and diversified way of life; Urban households in the informal economy; Changes in the organization of everyday life in the wake of financial crisis; Value change and learning effects at the globa-local nexus; Bibliography; Index.