The Conundrum Of Russian Capitalism

In this book Ruslan Dzarasov reveals the nature of Russian capitalism following the fall of the Soviet Union, showing how the system originated in both the degenerated Soviet bureaucracy and the pressures of global capital. He provides an unprecedented analysis of Russian firms' corporate governance and labor practices, and makes sense of their peculiar investment strategies. By comparing the practices of Russian companies to the typical models of corporate governance and investment behavior of big firms in the West, Dzarasov sheds light on the relationship between the core and periphery of the capitalist world-system. This groundbreaking study proves that Russia's new capitalism is not a break with the country's Stalinist past, but is in fact the continuation of that tradition. At the same time, the brutal and deficient character of the current system also reflects the realities of the modern globalized and financialized world capitalist system.

This book brings together some of the world's most successful Russia-dedicated portfolio managers, economists and market participants to share their personal experiences in this dynamic market. Many of the contributors have been active in Russia since the very inception of the market and each is uniquely qualified to offer a personal and authoritat

There has been a major revival of interest in State Capitalism: what it is, where it is found, and why it is seemingly becoming more ubiquitous. As a concept, it has evolved from radical critiques of the Soviet Union, to being deployed by neo-liberals to describe market reforms deemed imperfect, to settle into a middle ground, as a pragmatic way to describe the state assuming a role as an active economic agent, in addition to its regulatory, social, and security functions. The latter is the central focus of this book, although due attention is accorded to the origins of state capitalism and how it has changed over the years, as well as contemporary ways in which state capitalism may be theorized. This economic agency may assume direct forms, for example, via state owned enterprises. However, it may also be indirect, for example, actively serving private interests through promoting insider firms, who may occupy monopolistic market positions and perform outsourced state functions. In turn, this leads to raising salient governance questions. The latter may encompass agency tensions between public ownership, and political or even private interest control; it may also include issues of transparency and monitoring. Although state capitalism has often been depicted as the preserve of states in the global south, be they developmental or predatory, many forms of state capitalism are visible in mature economies, be they liberal or coordinated, and this is not always associated with superior governance arrangements; indeed, this is an area where clear and easy divisions between the "developing" or "emerging" world and the "developed" or "mature" world may increasingly be breaking down. This volume brings together the accounts of leading experts from around the world; it is explicitly multi-disciplinary, and both consolidates the existing knowledge base, and provides new, novel, and counter-intuitive insights.

This book presents theoretical and empirical investigation of economic growth in Russia. The sharp decline in the national production that Russia endured in the 1990s, linked directly to the exhausting and ill-planned transition from the planned economy to the market economy, resulted in Russia plunging into the poverty trap. The goal of this book is to determine whether and how Russia manages to overcome the poverty trap and initiate and sustain economic growth. This book fills the gap between the volatile economic growth as an objective economic reality of Russia and the lack of scholarly literature on the issue. This study identifies the place and role of foreign aid in economic growth in the market-type post-transitional Russian economy and concludes that foreign aid does not play any significant role in the national economy, contrary to what would follow from the classical poverty trap theory, considered, reviewed, applied and tested in this study. Development economists should not overestimate the role of foreign aid in overcoming the poverty trap in those developing economic systems that are currently not in equilibrium and only move toward their steady state. The book will be of interest to those who want to learn more about specific problems in Russia’s newly built capitalism, the country’s perspectives and its current semi-peripheral status. The book will also be an excellent supplement for students in Russian studies programs, as well as for investors who want to do business in Russia and try to understand the country’s domestic economic conditions and processes.

Challenging the assumptions of ‘mainstream’ International Political Economy (IPE), this Handbook demonstrates the considerable value of critical theory to the discipline through a series of cutting-edge studies. The field of IPE has always had an inbuilt vocation within Historical Materialism, with an explicit ambition to make sense, from a critical standpoint, of the capitalist mode of production as a world system of sometimes paradoxically and sometimes smoothly overlapping states and markets. Having spearheaded the growth of a vigorous critical scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s, however, Marxism and neo-Gramscian approaches became increasingly marginalized over the course of the 1980s. The authors respond to the exposure of limits to mainstream contemporary scholarship in the wake of the onset of the Global Financial Crisis, and provide a comprehensive overview of the field of Critical International Political Economy. Problematizing socioeconomic and political structures, and considering these as potentially transitory and subject to change, the contributors aim not simply to understand a world of conflict, but furthermore to uncover the ways in which purportedly objective analyses reflect the interests of those in positions of privilege and power.

This book is a unique contribution to scholarship on the sources of the conflict in Ukraine. The volume brings together writers from Russia, Ukraine, Canada, the United States, Europe and Australia, many of whom attended a gathering of scholars and activists from all over Ukraine, held in Yalta, Crimea, just after the conflict in Eastern Ukraine erupted. Challenging both the demonization of Russia, which has become standard for Western writing on the topic, and the simplistic discourse of official Russian sources, this book scrutinises the events of the conflict and the motives of the agents, bringing to the fore the underlying causes of the most critical flashpoints of the post-Soviet world order. This volume offers a refreshing, profound perspective on the Ukraine conflict, and will be an indispensable source for any student or researcher. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal International Critical Thought.