RICCARDO  TESSAROLLO

Il caso Russia: le radici istituzionali di una transizione difficile

N. 201

 

Summary - The Russian transition toward a market economy has been so far neither fast nor smooth. To put the question in a more dramatic way, in the Russian case the very notion of "transition" could be at issue.

As long as mainstream economic thought falls short of a full and satisfying explanation of the reforms' process in former central-planned economies, the so-called New Institutionalism offers a powerful toolbox of both conceptual and analytical instruments to investigate the Russian case.

According to the New Institutionalism’s view, a complex net of incentives and bounds (i e. "institutions"), determined by the underlying structure of transaction costs, conditions the economic behavior of economic agents.

The way the above mentioned net is shaped, depends on the historical legacy of each society in dealing with property rights, that are contracts and arrangements designed to work out transaction costs' problem. Following Nobel Laureate D.C. North’s words, in economics "history matters".

Relying on such a framework's insights, the present work tries to link Russian transition’s difficulties to a very specific institutional pattern, in which "rule of law" is fairly weaker than "rule of politics". This pattern's origins could be traced back not only to the socialist period, but also to the imperial age, and even earlier. The heavy burden of a multi-secular and deeply rooted tradition of government's credible commitment’s failures in defending economic agents' property rights utterly exerts its influence still today.

Once more, "history matters", indeed.