Household production and capitalist development in contemporary Russia

This essay reviews four recent books based on research on the development of capitalism and the position of household-based farming in post-Soviet Russia. Each of the books represents a different set of conceptual assumptions and is based on different methods of enquiry. It is argued that a problematic feature of much of the literature on this topic is that it begins from the assumption that successful capitalist development in Russian agriculture should be based on the development of small-scale family farming. This tends to obscure the variety of forms of production that have emerged so far and the range of different relationships between them

Agricultural transition and integration to the world economy: NIS case

The paper studies the major trends in the agri-food trade in the NIS countries. It describes the trade flows, production cooperation and trade regimes within NIS countries; trade with the rest of the world and accession to the WTO. The key tested hypothesis of the paper is that intra-region trade dominate international trade in the NIS region, however this centrifugal tendency is forced by nations specialization set in the Soviet period. The development process in the NIS countries will cause more deep international integration. Also paper measure IIT for the NIS countries both for trade within the region and beyond it as well as IIT for some particular groups af agri-food commodities. It allowed an author to understand whether product variety explain the growth in agri-food trade within NIS and beyond it.NIS countries, agri-food trade, trade liberalization, intra-industry trade (IIT), Agricultural and Food Policy, P33, O13,

The Role of Statistics in Agrarian Policy Formulation: The Russian Case

Agricultural and Food Policy,

Markets for Purchased Farm Inputs in Transitional Agriculture: Russia's Example

The common a priori persuasion is that agriculture suffers from decapitalization due to financial constraints faced by producers. This view is the basis for the national agricultural policy, which emphasizes reimbursement of input costs and substitutes government and quasi-government organizations for the missing market institutions. The article evaluates the availability of purchased farm inputs, the efficiency of their use, the main problems in the emergence of market institutions, and the impact of government policies. The analysis focuses on five groups of purchased inputs: farm machinery, fertilizers, fuel, seeds, and animal feed. The information sources include official statistics and data from two original surveys.Russian agriculture, transition economies, farm supply channels, government support programs, Agricultural and Food Policy, Community/Rural/Urban Development, P230, Q180,

TRANSITION AND FOOD CONSUMPTION

This paper examines why transition from planned to market economies in the countries of the former Soviet bloc has changed their mix and volumes of food consumption. During transition, consumption of high value products, such as meat and dairy products, has plummeted, while consumption of staple foods such as bread and potatoes has remained steady, or even increased. The paper shows that in the pre-reform planned economy, planners "desired" the production and national consumption of high value (and cost) foodstuffs more than consumers. When market reform resulted in consumer prices adjusting to reflect the full cost of production, consumer demand switched from high cost foods to other goods and services. The demand-driven nature of food restructuring in these countries has implications for food security, reinforcing the argument that any food security problems are not mainly the result of inadequate aggregate supplies of agricultural products.Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Head Movement, Suspended Affixation, and the Turkish Clausal Spine

Previous work has shown that Turkish has two structurally different ways of forming predicates with a range of effects for phonological stress, the selection of verbal suffixes, and particle placement (Hankamer 2008; Kelepir 2001; Kornfilt 1996; Zanon 2014). I present evidence drawn from a pilot study of a previously unnoticed difference between these predicate types: In vP-sized or larger coordinated phrases which realize a single sentencefinal predicate, verbal predicates are highly degraded when the person features on the conjuncts’ subjects mismatch, while participial predicates are relatively acceptable under the same conditions. Building on Kelepir (2001) & Zanon (2014)’s work on head-movement in Turkish predicates, I argue that gapping generates these strings from different sized coordinations, and explains the grammatical degradation split observed in the pilot study if we assume a more stringent identity requirement in Turkish gapping than we do for English

Building an institution with emotional labour: Analysis of a post-industrial art centre, beyond the creative industries

Once established, institutions become systems that imply the naturalness of their political and cultural dynamics. But how are institutions produced? This thesis presents an analysis of the Sydney post-industrial art centre Carriageworks. I argue that Carriageworks’ institutionalisation is enabled by social investment – specifically, the emotional labour of those separately involved in establishing, managing and working at the centre, as well as its publics. Given its location in a former industrial railway workshop adjacent to Redfern, a suburb famed for its Indigenous political activism, the establishment of Carriageworks would typically be read either as a welcome answer to urban decline, tied into place competition; or critically, as displacement in the name of cultural regeneration. However, I shift the focus from these creative industries formulations to argue that the establishment of Carriageworks was by no means a historical given. Ethnographic detail of this centre’s formation reveals the crucial role of emotional labour (a term I adapt from its beginnings in Arlie Hochschild’s work), in allowing this institution to exist and subsequently thrive. In presenting diverse instances of Carriageworks’ development, from instantiation to policy formulation, I also emphasise the affective power of its building in not only establishing the centre as an institution, but broadening the terms on which places like it can be valued. In the process, I explore how we can ‘deal with’ middle-class success, without immediately slapping it down with all analysis suspended, to consequently question the complex ways in which people relate to creative place

Russia's Transition to Major Player in World Agricultural Markets

Russia, Agriculture, Trade, Grain, Meat, WTO Accession, International Development, F14, P33, Q17,

Diversification of rural incomes and non-farm rural employment: evidence from Russia

Community/Rural/Urban Development,