1,721,094 research outputs found
Why is unemployment low in the former Soviet Union? : enterprises restructuring and the structure of compensation
Full text linkThe authors explain why in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) - especially Russia - unemployment has remained low and employment in state and privatized firms has remained high, while at the same time the informal or unofficial economy has grown swiftly. They trace this development to a combination of factors, including the control regime of state and privatized firms, the nature of worker compensation, and privatized firms, and the nature of subsidies or financial supports that firms continue to receive. Firms have remained the primary site for social protection. Subsidies for social benefits have effectively been a subsidy to employment and have promoted the workers'continuing attachment to these firms. Partly because the subsidies still flow and partly because of the firms'internal control structure, firms have held back on shedding labor. Firms typically work at low capacity. Instead of laying workers off, they significantly cut hours and wages, sometimes through wage arrears. The share of worker compensation that is nonmonetary had grown during the transition, and is significant. So workers search for additional sources of income, either moonlight or get involved in the informal economy. Why has this happened? Privatization has so far failed to keep firms from behaving as if they have important social responsibilities. Managers may have more discretion in decisionmaking, but seem tobe reluctant to fire workers. This reluctance reflects various pressures, including insider coalitions and pressure from local and federal governments to limit the flow to unemployment. One factor may be the need to keep workers cooperative and possibly repel outsider interest. And in the FSU, many firms continue to operate under soft budget constraints, so they are under less pressure to reduce employment levels than firms in Eastern and Central Europe. The authors show that under certain conditions if the subsidy to insider-dominated firms disappears, those firms will scale down employment and the provision of benefits. In a firm with two divisions - one that produces and one that provides benefits - the dominant (producing ) division will tend to close down the benefits-providing division if the firm assumes a simple majority decision rule.Economic Theory&Research,Municipal Financial Management,Decentralization,Environmental Economics&Policies,Banks&Banking Reform,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management
Restructuring and taxation in transition economies
Full text linkOne challenge in transition economies has been to avoid being caught between overrapid restructuring (harmful to the private sector) and gradual change (can undermine robust private sector emergence). Empirical evidence suggests thatin most of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, insiders, by exerting decision making control, have materially affected the restructuring rate. Still, shocks to firms have generally led to sharp rises in unemployment. Unemployment benefits, initially generous, combined with lost payroll taxes substantially increased fiscal costs. In the former Soviet Union, both restructuring and unemployment have remained limited and firm subsidies remained high. The private sector expanded, but chiefly in the gray (untaxed) part of the economy. The authors examine the implications of various restructuring speeds, explicitly introducing probabilities of closure and restructuring. They find that when the probability of closure is small, unemployment will peak at a lower level than when the probability of closure is high, although the transition speed will be much slower. They also find that widespread private sector tax avoidance can stimulate that sector's growth and result in a speedier transition. Thus, while a private sector low tax burden can drive unemployment up rapidly by increasing the state sector closure probability, it can also help speed up the transition by provoking a quicker private sector response. The authors show that while the state sector restructuring speed is sensitive to the tax burden, (dependent on unemployment and the ability to tax the private sector) it is also true that the private sectors growth depends on the tax burden it faces. In particular, capturing the private sector in the tax net early in the transition can lead to collapse and hence to the failure of restructuring.Trade Finance and Investment,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Economic Theory&Research,Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,National Governance,Youth and Governance,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies
Russian unemployment : its magnitude, characteristics, and regional dimensions
Full text linkRegistered unemployment in Russia is now 2 percent; surveys indicate a true rate of between 5 and 6 percent. Until now, flow in and out of unemployment have been quite large, with duration low. This may be changing as the ease with which workers are matched to jobs declines -- in part because of financing constraints on firms. Already there is great regional variation in unemployment -- which, as this model indicates, is likely to persist because of the mismatch in distribtution of jobs and the unemployed.Environmental Economics&Policies,Labor Policies,Public Health Promotion,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Labor Markets,Youth and Governance,Work&Working Conditions,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Labor Markets
Wage and employment decisions in the Russian economy : an analysis of developments in 1992
Full text linkThe authors analyze changes in the Russian labor market in 1992. They focus on the path of wages and employment in a context of partial price liberalization and considerable ambiguity about government and central bank policy. Under the former Soviet economy, the firm was the bedrock of the centrally planned system. The relaxation of centralized controls did not result in substantial employment losses partly because of the implicit moral economy of the system and partly because of continuing constraints on wages. In 1992, the wage structure and employment levels in the economy's state sector exhibited surprising stability, reflecting the system's immense inertia. Despite announced regime changes, at the end of 1992 the number of jobseekers was no more than 1.5 percent of the labor force. But significant changes have been made: wage and employment decisions have been widely liberalized; some restraints on labor mobility have been removed; changes have also been made in ownership title; and there has been some expansion in the private sector, as yet largely concentrated in services. These substantive changes are important for future expectations about entitlements to jobs and incomes, but the changes remain restricted and the sources of these restrictions imply significant economic costs. The underpinning of the current stagflation is the inability to break the soft budget constraint on state firms and to impose realistically a systematic, transparent set of constraints on the firms'financing demands. This has combined with the firms'continuing ability to exercise market power alongside weak controls on wage claims. Employment transitions have been dominated by high levels of quits at the base of the skill structure. Involuntary separations have been limited, involving mostly women and white collar workers. Firms commonly provide de facto unemployment compensation to workers in the form of minimum wage payments with little or no work requirement. There is evidence of some increase in the proportion of laid-off workers among the unemployed, but firms seem to prefer hoarding labor in light of uncertainty about policy, firm, or product-specific market prospects. Wages have been more volatile. Wages initially bore almost all of the adjustment costs, but have shown mild recovery thereafter. Lax monetary policy and decentralized insider power, giving rise to relative employment stability and real wage rigidity, are powerful ingredients for hyperinflation.Economic Theory&Research,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management
Unemployment and labor market dynamics in Russia
Full text linkThe past 15 months have seen the beginning of structural change in Russia but a failure of the economy to stabilize. The balance sheet, conclude the authors suggests that a return to centralized control remain almost impossible, but the dencentralization that has occurred contain many undesirable features. In framing their analysis, the authors draw on aggregate data and firm-level data from the first-round results of a 1992 survey covering 41 firms in the Moscow region. The survey results suggest that the greater autonomy of firms has facilitated the exploitation of market power while failing to dampen the demand for easy credit from the budget or banking system. For the most part, demand has been satisfied, enabling firms to meet current wage claims and, to a lesser degree, sustain output levels. Buoyant nominal profits can be traced either to pricing behavior derived from market power or to transfers or subsidies channeled through the fiscal monetary system. This in turn has artificially sustained the revenue side of the government accounts. Official employment was no more than 1 percent of the labor force by the end of 1992, but evidence on the importance of marginal unemployment indicates that the underlying pass-through into open unemployment will be great. By the third quarter of 1992, this"augmented"unemployment rate approached 4 percent of the labor force. Even so, the authors observe non-trivial outflows from unemployment to jobs and in some regions to jobs in the private or collective sector. In Russia, outflows to state sector jobs dominate. Survey evidence shows considerable turnover in the state sector and resilient hiring. Much of the churning in labor markets seems to be through voluntary separations and job transitions. Net changes to employment have been limited, and have involved mostly ancillary or clerical staff. The authors discern a core or membership rule dominating Russian firms'decisions which it would be dangerous to assume will be maintained. They interpret it as a holding strategy in a complex game the firms have been playing with government. Lack of a credible reform program has weakened any impulse toward large-scale restructuring of firms. Wages have been more volatile and have regional dispersion, but the authors predict no large consistent shift in relative wages. Rather the wage path has probably been governed by current streams and additional transfers, and then set consistent with the stable employment rule. The path of wages over 1992 is clearly associated with changes in Russia's monetary and fiscal stance and allied institutional features.Environmental Economics&Policies,Economic Theory&Research,Banks&Banking Reform,Markets and Market Access,Access to Markets
Institutions and Economic Performance: What Can Be Explained?
Full text linkInstitutions are now widely believed to be important in explaining performance. In this paper, we analyze whether commonly used measures of institutions have any significant, measurable impact on performance, whether of countries or firms. We look at three 'levels' of institutions and associated conjectures. The first concerns whether the political system affects performance. The second concerns whether the business and investment environment affects the performance of countries and the third concerns whether perceived business constraints directly affect the performance of firms. In all instances, we find little evidence of a robust link between widely used measures of institutions and our indicators of performance. We consider why this might be the case and argue that mis-measurement, mis-specification, complexity and non-linearity are all relevant factors.institutions, growth
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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