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The relationship between small business and poverty is inadequately substantiated, despite being an important economic and social nexus. We test the direct impact of small business on poverty, and of poverty on small business. Using panel data across 115 post-Soviet cities in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Russia and Ukraine, we examine early (1995–2002) and later (2003–08) transition periods. The findings show small business can reduce urban poverty during transition, and that higher poverty in cities impedes small business. We also find that changes in regional institutional context, knowledge and locational characteristics can facilitate or hamper both small business and poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the postwar USSR, there were a few scattered research groups engaged in research most closely resembling "Western" mainstream economics. Inspired by the new sciences of the artificial, these groups were able to make important contributions to various fields of economic theory. This article focuses on the story of one group created by the control engineer Mark Aizerman at the Institute of Control Sciences in Moscow. It discusses the origins and the outstanding diversity and dynamics of the group's research agenda, reconstructs the factors that made Aizerman turn from the cybernetics of mechanical or biological systems to the abstract theory of choice and rationality, and demonstrates how the group was related to--and communicated with--the scholars doing work in social choice, mechanism design, and formal political theory. It also speculates on one missed research opportunity of doing experimental economics--something that, given the ideological and intellectual constraints Aizerman was facing, was hardly possible in the Soviet context, but could have been a synthesis of economics and engineering. The article also discusses a research culture Aizerman created and nurtured in his lab by encouraging research collaboration, sharing ideas, and freely moving across various disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present contribution analyzes systematically diplomatic reports written by German, Italian, British, and Polish representatives in the Soviet Union at the time of the Great Famine. Based on both published documents and unpublished archival sources, the article examines comparatively the perception of the Great Famine in these four countries. After providing a short overview of the diplomatic relations between the Soviet Union and the four countries at the time of the famine, this article examines how German, Italian, British, and Polish diplomats explained three key issues for understanding the Great Famine: (1) the role of the conflicts between state and peasantry in unleashing the famine; (2) the issue of whether the Soviet government intentionally caused the famine; and (3) the role of intentions in the development of the famine and the relationship between the nationalities policy of the Soviet government and the famine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on research in Kazakhstani and Russian archives, this article is a regional study of the 1931–1933 Soviet famine. It compares Soviet policies in the southern and northern "halves" of the Aral Sea region. While the Kazaks in the northern part of the region suffered from the famine, the Karakalpaks in the south did not. The article explains this difference by underscoring the role of the main transportation infrastructure connecting Central Asia to Russia, the Orenburg-Tashkent railway. The railway crossed the northern, Kazak, part of the Aral Sea region and made massive livestock and grain procurements possible, while the absence of any reliable transportation route connecting Karakalpakstan to Soviet industrial centers contributed to shielding the Karakalpaks from the famine. The article also investigates the consequences of the famine for the Aral Sea fishing economy. The famine led to the inversion of the relative economic importance of the northern and southern parts of the sea: if before the famine fishing was concentrated in the former, after the famine it had shifted to the latter. Finally, the article situates the administrative detachment of Karakalpakstan from Kazakstan in 1930 within the context of Stalinist economic policies in Central Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the consequences of the economic developments and policies carried out in the regime of Russian leader Joseph Stalin. The author elaborates on the consequences of those policies for the consumers of the Soviet Union. As the consumer came last in Stalin's model of economic development, the consumer had to bear the brunt of the negative impacts of the policies. In those policies, the priority was placed on heavy industry, with the hope that this will cause overall economic growth in the long run. With that hope and promise, the consumers had been witnessing the diversion of the country's resources into industrial and military buildup. The author elaborates on the popular discontent caused by those policies.

The article discusses joint ventures between business enterprises within the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Poor economic conditions in the Soviet Union from 1978 to 1985 caused the Soviets to rethink their economic policy and launch perestroika, a program designed to revive the Soviet economy. The 1987 Joint Venture Decree authorized Soviet firms to enter into joint ventures with foreign companies, encouraging closer cooperation between Western companies and Soviet entities. A study is examined which looked at negotiations and operations of Soviet-U.S. joint ventures registered through January 1990. Prior to December 1988, U.S. partners in Soviet-U.S. joint ventures were not allowed to own a majority share.

The article reports on the pricing system for agricultural markets established in the Soviet Union after World War II and it's implications for the peasant economy. The pricing system, designed to reduce risk related to price fluctuations associated with agricultural commodities, is influenced by the government. The author focuses on the logistical factors that influence peasants who take part in the farmers' markets, such as market entry fees and costs related to the transportation of goods. The relationship between open-market and state-controlled prices is examined. A rationing plan instituted by the government during World War II, which halted the production of consumer goods, is also discussed.

The article discusses the management control system in the Soviet Union and economic reform that is focused on improving business conditions and increasing economic growth. With some decentralization allowed by the Central Planning Authority, business can control the size of three new funds: the bonus fund, social-cultural-housing fund, and production development fund. Volume of sales, profit, and rate of return on gross assets at original cost are the accounting surrogates or variables that are expected to impact management decisions. Accounting methods for extraordinary loss and a levy on gross assets are explained. Three factors in decision making, four functions of performance indicators, and nine components in Soviet reforms are mentioned.

The article focuses on the duties and benefits of factory managers in the Soviet Union. It states that the western style of business administration is not taught in the Soviet Union and that officials in Moscow stated that schools of business administration are not considered necessary. It mentions that plant directors are given thorough technical training, usually in engineering schools, emphasizing scientific training and technical ability. It comments on salaries and bonuses of factory managers in the Soviet Union and suggests that while bonuses are supposed to be awarded only when goals have been reached, the bonuses are actually considered more or less the rule.

This article empirically investigates the effects of corruption and privatisation on economic growth in the post-communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR. We use a corruption and privatisation augmented open-economy leader-follower endogenous growth model to derive our research hypotheses. In this setting, corruption, privatisation and external openness jointly determine the per capita income in the follower economy. This model predicts that economies with higher shares of private ownership, lower corruption, and higher external openness enjoy higher rates of growth. Our empirical verification of these predictions is based on a panel of 29 post-communist countries during the period 1996-2014. Our estimation results confirm the negative effects of corruption, while the positive effects of privatisation are limited to small-scale privatisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores creative reuse as an alternative modality to upcycle the materiality and documentary capacities of things, beyond the linear entrapments of historical or functional redundancy. Drawing on an amphibious ethnography of Volgograd's riverscapes, we analyse the floating churches inaugurated after the collapse of the Soviet Union to support the revival of faith practices. Acting as mobile centres of religious activity, they morph various temporalities, functions and places into multidimensional operative domains that range from the embodied practices of sailing and engaging in religious rituals to the making of sacred space at a regional level. We conclude by suggesting that their operations and impact rely on topologies of fixed points and shifting spatialities, which provide a salient vehicle for broader geographical interrogations of memory, creativity and mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study measures the informal economy and shortages of consumer goods in the Soviet republics from 1965 to 1989 to estimate the relationships between these two variables. Using estimation methods, including a fixed-effect model and the instrumental variable approach, we find that the informal economy and shortages reinforced each other. Results indicate that the Soviet central planning system was difficult to sustain. Substantial heterogeneities across the Soviet republics exist not only in the extent of the informal economy and shortages, but also in the associations between the two variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic debate on a transition strategy for former socialist economies continues even a quarter century after the collapse of the communism in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In this paper, through an analytical survey of 137 preceding studies, we present an overall picture of the debate and examine the relationship between the debate attitudes and the literature attributes in related studies. We found that the radicalists maintain a consistent debate attitude from the viewpoints of time speed and policy sequence of economic transition, while the debate attitude of the gradualists is more diversified. We also found that there is another group of researchers that stays within the framework of the radicalism-versus-gradualism debate while at the same time keeping at arm's length from both the radicalists and the gradualists. In addition, our regression estimation of qualitative selection models provides interesting findings on the relationship between the debate attitudes and the literature attributes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard economics omits the role of narratives (the stories that people tell themselves and others) when they make all kinds of decisions. Narratives play a role in understanding the environment; focusing attention; predicting events; motivating action; assigning social roles and identities; defining power relations; and establishing and conveying social norms. This paper describes the role narratives play in decision making, as it also juxtaposes this description against the backdrop of the Bolshevik-spawned narrative that played a critical role in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union in the 20th Century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses enforcement of consumption policies in various countries between 1951-1990 including Soviet Union, German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Romania. Various topics discussed include impact of shortages on countries' consumption, state socialist consumption, entitlement and exchange between policymakers and consumers.

The article discusses importance of forecasting and scientific future studies in the formation of government in Soviet Union in the post-Stalinist period. Various topics discussed include use of forecasting for presenting future of economy and society, history of forecasting and economic planning debates in the 1960s.

This paper looks at recovery from the normative collapse which followed the fall of the Soviet Union; two large-scale surveys allow comparison of levels of trust in 2001 and 2010/2011. The collapse of the Soviet Union was not just an economic event; it destroyed the normative framework and drove people back to reliance on things they could see and people they knew. The main findings are that even 20 years of building new institutions has not restored trust. Countries differ: Moldova, Kyrgyzstan and Ukraine have the least trust and the least faith in the future, and Kazakhstan has the highest, followed by Russia and Armenia. There is a relationship with economic recovery and also with sociopolitical factors, but, for the most part, the results reflect the failure of a range of autocratic and authoritarian regimes to establish social cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article presents an evaluation of documents from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) pertaining to its economic analyses of the Soviet Union and its economy during the Cold War era. The standards of critical thinking are used in assessing Soviet data covering defense spending, gross national product (GNP), and economic policies and reforms. The errors committed by the CIA in ascertaining the capabilities of the Soviet Union are mentioned.

This study examines quantitatively the relationship between special foreign-trade earnings (SFEs), which effectively represent import and export taxes, and money supply in the Soviet Union. The Soviet SFEs, as well as foreign trade taxes in market economies, can be decomposed into change in money supply and redistribution of domestic funds. A change in money supply alters the net amount of available funds, whereas redistribution of funds does not. The decomposition demonstrated that redistribution accounted for about 90% of SFEs, which generated 7% to 15% of state budget revenue in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, less than one-tenth of SFEs corresponded to net changes in domestic funds. Thus, the SFEs mechanism is not an instrument of fiscal revenue, but a by-product of comprehensive price control. The size of SFEs indicated the magnitude of price distortion, rather than the financial benefits from foreign trade. We need more data on foreign economic activities, in particular Soviet balance of payments data, to further investigate the relation between the Soviet domestic financial economy and foreign economic activities. Hopefully, the data will be discovered in Soviet archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a historical division into periods of the Chinese diaspora in the Soviet Far East from 1922 to 1938. Three periods in the attitude of the Soviet authorities toward Chinese migrants have been singled out on the basis of the foreign and domestic political situation in the U.S.S.R. This approach makes it possible to better analyze the policy toward migrants and understand the reasons for the deportation of the Chinese diaspora from the Soviet Far East. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author proves that the Soviet economy in the middle of 80s was overestimated as many as 4 times by the Soviet official statistics due to pripiski—deliberately overstated data on the produced goods and services and maximally overestimating the cost of production by using both the most costly raw materials and equipment and an increased number of intermediate operations, each of which is produced in a separate enterprise. All such things cause a dramatic increase in the gross cost of production at the expense of double accounting, but without any increase in the physical volume of output or the improvement of its consumer qualities. Such double accounting is called as ‘imaginary value’. The author estimates the real Soviet GNP as only one sixth of the American one in the middle of 80s. And the Soviet Military expenditures constituted about 42 percent of GNP. ‘Imaginary value’ was a very important means of distribution and re-distribution of goods in the Soviet planned economy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A substantial body of literature argues that government funding motivated by the Cold War shaped (or distorted) the content of the American academic disciplines. This article tests the impact of such funding on the academic study of the Soviet economy, a small field created to help fight the Cold War. It documents the amount of attention given by researchers to the military sector of the Soviet economy, the topic of central importance for the Cold War, and finds that their publications largely ignored it. Considerations other than the interests of the sponsors determined the choice of topics in the discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a reinterpretation of the origins of the Cold War from a novel point of view: Soviet foreign economic policy. It questions two fundamental concepts that have formed the basis for our understanding of that conflict: Soviet autarky, and bipolarity. Soviet autarky has been the basis for an understanding of a “war” that, although never fought on military terms, needed two sides to be so conceptualized. Just as enemies in war can have no areas of meaningful cooperation, so did academics require of these Cold War rivals an all-encompassing enmity. To do so they came to consider the Soviet Union a camp apart, unconnected and hostile to the capitalist order. Scholars required a Soviet Union politically committed to autarky. Using archives from Moscow, however, the article argues that the Soviet Union was not autarkic by political choice and, at length, not autarkic at all. It followed a similar trajectory in international economic engagement as that of the countries in the so-called free world, and what's more, sought to do so. In other words, when one looks at the political economy of Soviet economic relations, the conceptual framework of bipolarity that sustains much of the work on the Cold War becomes difficult to maintain. Instead, I argue, an immensely powerful liberal world order acted on the Soviet Union in ways that should be familiar to scholars of global capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An introduction is presented for the journal's special forum section on the economics of the interwar period of 1917-1939 in the Soviet Union, citing contributions on Soviet economic policy and history by Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Andrew Sloin, and Marcie Cowley.