• T. Dolgopyatova — Concentrated Stock Ownership and Business Development: Empirical Evidence from Russian Companies
• S. Avdasheva — Russian Holding Company Groups: New Empirical Evidence
• I. Iwasaki — Legal Form of Joint-stock Companies and Corporate Performance in Russia
• A. Yakovlev — The Russian Corporation and Regional Governments: Models of Interrelations and Their Evolution

• R. Samsonov — Institutional Monopolism: The Essence and Regulation Specifics
• A. Kuz’mina — Labor Force Potential and Market of Educational Services

• Social and Economic Models in the Modern World and Russia’s Way. In Two Books. Book 2: Socioeconomic Models (from the International Experience)

• Corruption: Where, Why and What to Do? (The ARETT Debating-Society "The Knots of Economic Policyquot;)

• Semen Aronovich Kheinman — The Outstanding Soviet Economist

Abstracts

Two aspects of the problem of corruption are discussed in the article. The first one concerns the evaluation of the level of corruption. The method of measuring the size of business corruption market is described. The specifics of its estimation as well as its relation with the main macroeconomic indexes are discussed. The second aspect regards the strategies of corruption reduction. The importance of establishing external control over the bureaucracy is noted. The failure of institutions transplantation as the main method of economic transformations is pointed out. The gaps in social knowledge are discussed, which decrease effectiveness of institutional borrowings.

This articles surveys existing estimates of corruption in Russia and relevant quantitative cross-country research on this phenomenon. While it is not clear whether there has been a substantial growth of corruption, its current level is certainly too high. It may substantially slow down economic development and growth already in the near future. In order to fight ¬corruption in Russia, one needs at least to promote media freedom and reverse the nationalization policies.

The authors introduce the notion of institutional economic space of the functioning of business firms taking into account their corrupt behaviour. Based on the survey of the firms’ CEOs they construct a taxonomy of the companies in this space, analyze the factors, which influence the choice of certain business strategies, evaluate the efficiency of each strategy. The authors draw from the empirical information the peculiar properties of corrupt interactions between firms and bureaucratic structures.

The paper addresses the analysis of economic approaches to the corruption research. Essence and different kinds of corruption are considered from the economic point of view as well as the impact of corruption on social welfare. The author shows that it is impossible to clarify, whether corruption has a positive or a negative effect, because it may both reduce and increase social welfare. If the corruption causes under-consumption of the public good as compared with the situation of its absence, then there is real social loss in the total consumption. But corruption may also increase the volume of total consumption, therefore increasing social welfare.

The article analyzes the efficiency of various forms of punishment for acquisitive crimes in the light of the economic theory of crime proposed by G. S. Becker. The authors consider Russian legislation in this context and argue for the preference of the fine sanctions over the imprisonment.

The author describes the contribution to economic theory made by E. Phelps, the 2006 Nobel prize winner in economics. Phelps is one of those scientists, who studied the reasons, why the attempt to use Phillips curve for the purposes of monetary policy in the 1970s failed. He also became one of the founders of the New Keynesian theory of the Phillips curve. This theory helps to better understand the principles of monetary policy in the developed countries as well as in today’s Russia.

The role of evolutionary economics in the development of economic growth theory is considered in the article. Different types of evolutionary models are distinguished, analyzed and compared with neoclassical models. Special attention is paid to the treatment of scientific and technological progress, particularly within the framework of the models of technological diffusion.

The paper describes composition of stock ownership in Russian companies with particular attention to its concentration and effects on corporate control. Special attention is paid to business integration as important background for ownership consolidation. The paper analyzes intra-corporate relations among main actors of corporate governance and functioning of its internal tools with special focus on Board of Directors’ composition and role. The correlation between the degree of concentration and companies’ performance and modernization activities is also discussed. The research is based on large-scale survey of 822 joint-stock companies in industry and communications conducted in 2005 in 64 regions of the Russian Federation. The survey was organized within the joint Japanese-Russian project that is being implemented by scholars from the State University — Higher School of Economics and Hitotsubashi University.

The article is devoted to Russian holding company groups. New sample survey data allow discussing the scale of expansion and internal structure of these groups, incentives to create them, the patterns of corporate governance and decision-making, scale of their internal financial market. In spite of the fact that holding company groups are extremely heterogeneous, most of them constitute new companies, which overcome the weaknesses of insider ownership model, with converged ownership and management. Companies in the holdings retain certain degree of autonomy in decision-making, and at the same time this process is connected with corporate governance procedures. Still the trends in the development of corporate governance are controversial and it is too early to conclude that the model of ownership separated from management inside the holding company groups has definitely proved its viability.

Basing on the results of a Russia-Japan joint enterprise survey conducted in 2005, the paper examines the legal-organizational form of joint-stock ¬companies (JSCs) in Russia. The Federal Law on joint-stock companies stipulates that JSCs should be established in one of the two different legal forms, namely «open» or «closed» companies that provide a unique institutional setting for Russian firms from the viewpoint of their corporate governance. The paper deliberates the determinants of organizational choice between these two legal forms. Then it examines empirical relations between the legal forms of JSCs and their organizational behavior.

Increasing pressure from the global market is an objective reason for the business community to seek government support. However, after the Yukos ¬affair the Russian business has found itself in a subdued posture towards ¬federal authorities. For this reason, Russian companies may be expected to more closely cooperate with regional and local administrations in pursue of more favorable conditions for business. At the same time fiscal reform and ¬delimitation of powers between the federal center and subjects of the Federation have reduced financial capacities of regional governments, while the scope of their past liabilities has been left almost unchanged. In this situation, regional authorities, in turn, may find new incentives to change their policy posture towards the business community. In this paper we assess, using the results of a new empirical study of Russian joint stock companies, to what extent these two trends have affected real mechanisms of interaction between the business and the state at the regional level.