Author: Michael Alexeev
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199344132
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 864
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Book Description
By 1999, Russia's economy was growing at almost 7% per year, and by 2008 reached 11th place in the world GDP rankings. Russia is now the world's second largest producer and exporter of oil, the largest producer and exporter of natural gas, and as a result has the third largest stock of foreign exchange reserves in the world, behind only China and Japan. But while this impressive economic growth has raised the average standard of living and put a number of wealthy Russians on the Forbes billionaires list, it has failed to solve the country's deep economic and social problems inherited from the Soviet times. Russia continues to suffer from a distorted economic structure, with its low labor productivity, heavy reliance on natural resource extraction, low life expectancy, high income inequality, and weak institutions. While a voluminous amount of literature has studied various individual aspects of the Russian economy, in the West there has been no comprehensive and systematic analysis of the socialist legacies, the current state, and future prospects of the Russian economy gathered in one book. The Oxford Handbook of the Russian Economy fills this gap by offering a broad range of topics written by the best Western and Russian scholars of the Russian economy. While the book's focus is the current state of the Russian economy, the first part of the book also addresses the legacy of the Soviet command economy and offers an analysis of institutional aspects of Russia's economic development over the last decade. The second part covers the most important sectors of the economy. The third part examines the economic challenges created by the gigantic magnitude of regional, geographic, ethnic, religious and linguistic diversity of Russia. The fourth part covers various social issues, including health, education, and demographic challenges. It will also examine broad policy challenges, including the tax system, rule of law, as well as corruption and the underground economy. Michael Alexeev and Shlomo Weber provide for the first time in one volume a complete, well-rounded, and essential look at the complex, emerging Russian economy.
Author: Fiona Hill
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815796188
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 328
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Book Description
Can Russia ever become a normal, free-market, democratic society? Why have so many reforms failed since the Soviet Union's collapse? In this highly-original work, Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy argue that Russia's geography, history, and monumental mistakes perpetrated by Soviet planners have locked it into a dead-end path to economic ruin. Shattering a number of myths that have long persisted in the West and in Russia, The Siberian Curse explains why Russia's greatest assets––its gigantic size and Siberia's natural resources––are now the source of one its greatest weaknesses. For seventy years, driven by ideological zeal and the imperative to colonize and industrialize its vast frontiers, communist planners forced people to live in Siberia. They did this in true totalitarian fashion by using the GULAG prison system and slave labor to build huge factories and million-person cities to support them. Today, tens of millions of people and thousands of large-scale industrial enterprises languish in the cold and distant places communist planners put them––not where market forces or free choice would have placed them. Russian leaders still believe that an industrialized Siberia is the key to Russia's prosperity. As a result, the country is burdened by the ever-increasing costs of subsidizing economic activity in some of the most forbidding places on the planet. Russia pays a steep price for continuing this folly––it wastes the very resources it needs to recover from the ravages of communism. Hill and Gaddy contend that Russia's future prosperity requires that it finally throw off the shackles of its Soviet past, by shrinking Siberia's cities. Only by facilitating the relocation of population to western Russia, closer to Europe and its markets, can Russia achieve sustainable economic growth. Unfortunately for Russia, there is no historical precedent for shrinking cities on the scale that will be required. Downsizing Siberia will be a costly and wrenching proce
Author: CAITLIN. FINLAYSON
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :
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Author: Robert G. Jensen
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226398310
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 910
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Book Description
Russia is a huge storehouse of natural resources, including oil, gas, and other energy sources, which she can trade with the rest of the world for advanced technology and wheat. In this book, leading experts evaluate the Soviet potential in major energy and industrial raw materials, giving special attention to implications for the world economy to the end of the twentieth century. The authors examine the mineral and forest resources that the Soviet Union has developed and may yet develop to provide exports during the 1980s. They discuss the regional dimension of these resources, especially in Siberia and the Soviet Far East; individual mineral raw materials, such as petroleum, natural gas, timber, iron ore, manganese, and gold; and finally the role of raw materials in Soviet foreign trade. The authors, representing the United States, Canada, and Great Britain, are primarily geographers, but they include economists, political scientists, and a geologist. Their work is based on primary sources (for most of these reports, current information is no longer being released to researchers) and on interviews with Soviet officials.
Author: Christina E. Crawford
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501759213
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 422
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Book Description
Spatial Revolution is the first comparative parallel study of Soviet architecture and planning to create a narrative arc across a vast geography. The narrative binds together three critical industrial-residential projects in Baku, Magnitogorsk, and Kharkiv, built during the first fifteen years of the Soviet project and followed attentively worldwide after the collapse of capitalist markets in 1929. Among the revelations provided by Christina E. Crawford is the degree to which outside experts participated in the construction of the Soviet industrial complex, while facing difficult topographies, near-impossible deadlines, and inchoate theories of socialist space-making. Crawford describes how early Soviet architecture and planning activities were kinetic and negotiated and how questions about the proper distribution of people and industry under socialism were posed and refined through the construction of brick and mortar, steel and concrete projects, living laboratories that tested alternative spatial models. As a result, Spatial Revolution answers important questions of how the first Soviet industrialization drive was a catalyst for construction of thousands of new enterprises on remote sites across the Eurasian continent, an effort that spread to far-flung sites in other socialist states—and capitalist welfare states—for decades to follow. Thanks to generous funding from Emory University and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
Author: Judith Pallot
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000399532
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
Originally published in 1981 and based on the authors’ own research, this book provides a comprehensive review of planning in the Soviet Union up until the early 1980s for both geographers and Soviet specialists. Planning was particularly important in the Soviet Union since not only most spatial change, but all economic planning was the product of a systematic socio-political ideology. Planning was therefore the key to understanding the Soviet economy, society and spatial change. When it was first published, this was the first study in which the focus had been directed specifically at spatial planning in the Soviet Union in any systematic way.
Author: United States. Congress. Joint Economic Committee
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 476
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Author: World Bank
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 082137608X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 410
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Book Description
Rising densities of human settlements, migration and transport to reduce distances to market, and specialization and trade facilitated by fewer international divisions are central to economic development. The transformations along these three dimensions density, distance, and division are most noticeable in North America, Western Europe, and Japan, but countries in Asia and Eastern Europe are changing in ways similar in scope and speed. 'World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography' concludes that these spatial transformations are essential, and should be encouraged. The conclusion is not without controversy. Slum-dwellers now number a billion, but the rush to cities continues. Globalization is believed to benefit many, but not the billion people living in lagging areas of developing nations. High poverty and mortality persist among the world's 'bottom billion', while others grow wealthier and live longer lives. Concern for these three billion often comes with the prescription that growth must be made spatially balanced. The WDR has a different message: economic growth is seldom balanced, and efforts to spread it out prematurely will jeopardize progress. The Report: documents how production becomes more concentrated spatially as economies grow. proposes economic integration as the principle for promoting successful spatial transformations. revisits the debates on urbanization, territorial development, and regional integration and shows how today's developers can reshape economic geography.
Author: Stephen Lovell
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199238480
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 169
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Book Description
Taking a fresh approach to the study of the Soviet Union, this Very Short Introduction blends political history with an investigation into Soviet society and culture from 1917 to 1991. Stephen Lovell examines aspects of patriotism, political violence, poverty, and ideology, and provides answers to some of the big questions about the Soviet experience. Throughout, the book takes a refreshing thematic approach to the Soviet Union and provides an up-to-date consideration of the Soviet Union's impact and what we have learnt since its end.
Author: I︠U︡lian Glebovich Saushkin
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Economic geography
Languages : en
Pages : 316
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Book Description
