Nonuniform Development of Municipalities
The paper is focused on uneven development of municipalities in Russia. A feasible method of assessing inequality of local development within regions is suggested and applied to four Russian regions. The analysis shows that in the late 1990s constant increase in inequality was observed, based on constructed municipal development/welfare indicators. Economic growth in that period had an uneven impact and did not create additional development opportunities for weak and economically stagnated municipalities.
Fiscal federalism and regional performance in Russia
Sound regional policies are essential for balanced and sustained economic growth. The interaction of federal and regional policies with cross-regional structural differences affects human and physical capital formation, the business climate, private investment, market depth, and competition. This paper summarizes the main elements of Russia’s fiscal federalism, describes the channels through which it operates, and assesses the effectiveness of regional transfers in reducing regional disparities. The results suggest that federal transfers to regions contributed to reducing disparities arising from heterogeneous regional tax bases and fiscal revenues. This allowed regions with initially lower per capita income to increase human and physical capital at higher rates. There is little evidence for transfers contributing to increased cross-regional growth synchronization. The results also suggest that federal transfers did not significantly improve regional fiscal sustainability, a conclusion that is supported by the lack of convergence in per capita real income across Russian regions in the last 15 years.
Did the metamorphosis from Export Processing Zones to Special Economic Zones improve the efficiency of trade enclaves in India?
In this paper, the efficiency of seven conventional Special Economic Zones in India is analyzed, by adopting a stochastic production frontier technique, for the period between 1986–1987 and 2007–2008.Results indicate that although the efficiency scores of these enclaves have improved over the years, specifically with the introduction of the SEZ policy (2000–2001), it is far below the threshold level as identified in the literature. Besides, one can also observe a discrepancy emerging between better export earning zones and efficient zones. On the determinants side, policy intervention and large geographical area, accompanied by clustering of units, are found to have impacted the efficiency scores of these enclaves positively.