Fifteen years of economic reform in Russia: what has been achieved, what remains to be done?

The paper provides an overview of the course of economic reform and the performance of the Russian economy since the early 1990s and an analysis of the structural reform challenges ahead. It assesses the contribution of institutional and structural reforms to economic performance over the period, before turning to the question of where further structural reforms could make the biggest contribution to improved performance. Three major conclusions emerge. First, there is still a great deal to be done to strengthen the basic institutions of the market economy. While the Russian authorities have embarked on some impressive – and often technically complex – ‘second-generation’ reforms, many ‘first-generation’ reforms have yet to be completed. Secondly, the central challenges of Russia’s second decade of reform are primarily concerned with reforming state institutions. Thirdly, the pursuit of reforms across a broad front could enable Russia to profit from complementarities that exist among various strands of reform

Trade Policies in Central Asia after EU Enlargement and before Russian WTO Accession: Regionalism and Integration into the World Economy

trade policy, WTO, regionalism, integration, Central Asia

Voters Get What They Want (When They Pay Attention): Human Rights, Policy Benefits, and Foreign Aid

How do the human rights practices abroad affect decisions about the allocation of foreign aid? This article provides a new approach to this long-standing question. We bring donor government, donor citizens, and recipients’ attributes together in a single analytical framework. We argue that donor citizens are more self-serving than previously assumed; they do not wholeheartedly support their government punishing human rights abusers when those states provide important policy benefits. When donor governments believe that their citizens will hold them accountable for their policy choices, they make foreign aid decisions that mirror citizens’ self-serving policy preferences. Thus, they avoid punishing repressive regimes that are the sources of valuable benefits. Our experimental and observational results provide support for our claims. Overall, our findings suggest that aid donors selectively punish human rights violators with aid cuts, but their variegated treatment of human rights violators largely stems from the self-serving policy preferences of their voters

Capital dispersion and productivity in Portugal during the Troika period

Mestrado Bolonha em EconomiaPortugal has struggled economically since the beginning of the twenty-first century. One reason for this is the low productivity of the portuguese manufacturing sector, which is particularly punishing to a country in the context of the eurozone. Using data for manufacturing firms in Portugal between 2011 and 2019, I document a countercyclical movement of productivity losses from capital misallocation, the increased dispersion of labor since 2011, even with a low and steady dispersion of the marginal product of labor, and the very high dispersion of capital and its marginal product. Using the same model as in Gopinath et al. (2017), even under a similar setting of falling real interest rate, I find evidence pointing the problems of productivity in Portugal away from being purely related with financial frictions, and provide markups and competition as a potential avenue to complement an explanation to this phenomenon.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Retribution Revisited: A Reconsideration of Feminist Criminal Law Reform Strategies

Were the last 30 years of feminist law reform activity around criminal justice misdirected? Or, if not misdirected, have the efforts been appropriated and manipulated by the New Right? This commentary reflects on this history, and on the failures of the retributive justice project generally, and argues for a reexamination of both. The discussion focuses on the tactics of the New Right and on the retributive goals of some victims\u27 rights organizations as a means of highlighting the unintended consequences of key feminist initiatives around violence against women. Finally, the commentary identifies alternatives to retribution and a need for careful attention to the wider implications of all activism

Retribution Revisited: A Reconsideration of Feminist Criminal Law Reform Strategies

Were the last 30 years of feminist law reform activity around criminal justice misdirected? Or, if not misdirected, have the efforts been appropriated and manipulated by the New Right? This commentary reflects on this history, and on the failures of the retributive justice project generally, and argues for a reexamination of both. The discussion focuses on the tactics of the New Right and on the retributive goals of some victims\u27 rights organizations as a means of highlighting the unintended consequences of key feminist initiatives around violence against women. Finally, the commentary identifies alternatives to retribution and a need for careful attention to the wider implications of all activism

Am I My Brother’s Keeper?: The Moral and Economic Costs of Criminalizing Mental Illness

Article published in the Michigan State University School of Law Student Scholarship Collection

Re-feedback: freedom with accountability for causing congestion in a connectionless internetwork

This dissertation concerns adding resource accountability to a simplex internetwork such as the Internet, with only necessary but sufficient constraint on freedom. That is, both freedom for applications to evolve new innovative behaviours while still responding responsibly to congestion; and freedom for network providers to structure their pricing in any way, including flat pricing. The big idea on which the research is built is a novel feedback arrangement termed ‘re-feedback’. A general form is defined, as well as a specific proposal (re-ECN) to alter the Internet protocol so that self-contained datagrams carry a metric of expected downstream congestion. Congestion is chosen because of its central economic role as the marginal cost of network usage. The aim is to ensure Internet resource allocation can be controlled either by local policies or by market selection (or indeed local lack of any control). The current Internet architecture is designed to only reveal path congestion to end-points, not networks. The collective actions of self-interested consumers and providers should drive Internet resource allocations towards maximisation of total social welfare. But without visibility of a cost-metric, network operators are violating the architecture to improve their customer’s experience. The resulting fight against the architecture is destroying the Internet’s simplicity and ability to evolve. Although accountability with freedom is the goal, the focus is the congestion metric, and whether an incentive system is possible that assures its integrity as it is passed between parties around the system, despite proposed attacks motivated by self-interest and malice. This dissertation defines the protocol and canonical examples of accountability mechanisms. Designs are all derived from carefully motivated principles. The resulting system is evaluated by analysis and simulation against the constraints and principles originally set. The mechanisms are proven to be agnostic to specific transport behaviours, but they could not be made flow-ID-oblivious