Patterns of regional differentiation in post-Soviet Russia

This doctoral thesis aims at contributing to the literature on transition economies focusing on the Russian Federations and in particular on regional income convergence and fertility patterns. The first two chapter deal with the issue of income convergence across regions. Chapter 1 provides an historical-institutional analysis of the period between the late years of the Soviet Union and the last decade of economic growth and a presentation of the sample with a description of gross regional product composition, agrarian or industrial vocation, labor. Chapter 2 contributes to the literature on exploratory spatial data analysis with a application to a panel of 77 regions in the period 1994-2008. It provides an analysis of spatial patterns and it extends the theoretical framework of growth regressions controlling for spatial correlation and heterogeneity. Chapter 3 analyses the national demographic patterns since 1960 and provides a review of the policies on maternity leave and family benefits. Data sources are the Statistical Yearbooks of USSR, the Statistical Yearbooks of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Demographic Yearbooks of Russia. Chapter 4 analyses the demographic patterns in light of the theoretical framework of the Becker model, the Second Demographic Transition and an economic-crisis argument. With national data from 1960, the theoretically issue of the pro or countercyclical relation between income and fertility is graphically analyzed and discussed, together with female employment and education. With regional data after 1994 different panel data models are tested. Individual level data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey are employed using the logit model. Chapter 5 employs data from the Generations and Gender Survey by UNECE to focus on postponement and second births intentions. Postponement is studied through cohort analysis of mean maternal age at first birth, while the methodology used for second birth intentions is the ordered logit model.

Essays in Industrial Organization and Information Technology

Chapter 1 studies how consumers’ switching costs affect the pricing and profits of firms competing in two-sided markets such as Apple and Google in the smartphone market. When two-sided markets are dynamic – rather than merely static – I show that switching costs lower the first-period price if network externalities are strong, which is in contrast to what has been found in one-sided markets. By contrast, switching costs soften price competition in the initial period if network externalities are weak and consumers are more patient than the platforms. Moreover, an increase in switching costs on one side decreases the first-period price on the other side. Chapter 2 examines firms’ incentives to invest in local and flexible resources when demand is uncertain and correlated. I find that market power of the monopolist providing flexible resources distorts investment incentives, while competition mitigates them. The extent of improvement depends critically on demand correlation and the cost of capacity: under social optimum and monopoly, if the flexible resource is cheap, the relationship between investment and correlation is positive, and if it is costly, the relationship becomes negative; under duopoly, the relationship is positive. The analysis also sheds light on some policy discussions in markets such as cloud computing. Chapter 3 develops a theory of sequential investments in cybersecurity. The regulator can use safety standards and liability rules to increase security. I show that the joint use of an optimal standard and a full liability rule leads to underinvestment ex ante and overinvestment ex post. Instead, switching to a partial liability rule can correct the inefficiencies. This suggests that to improve security, the regulator should encourage not only firms, but also consumers to invest in security.

Fighting corruption with pyramids: A Law and Economics approach to combating corruption in post-socialist countries

Corruption is, in the last two decades, considered as one of the biggest problems within the international community, which harms not only a particular state or society but the whole world. The discussion on corruption in law and economics approach is mainly run under the veil of Public choice theory and principal-agent model. Based on this approach the strong international initiatives taken by the UN, the OECD and the Council of Europe, provided various measures and tools in order to support and guide countries in their combat against corruption. These anti-corruption policies created a repression -prevention-transparency model for corruption combat. Applying this model, countries around the world adopted anti-corruption strategies as part of their legal rules. Nevertheless, the recent researches on the effects of this move show non impressive results. Critics argue that “one size does not fit all” because the institutional setting of countries around the world varies. Among the countries which experience problems of corruption, even though they follow the dominant anti-corruption trends, are transitional, post-socialist countries. To this group belong the countries which are emerging from centrally planned to an open market economy. The socialist past left traces on institutional setting, mentality of the individuals and their interrelation, particularly in the domain of public administration. If the idiosyncrasy of these countries is taken into account the suggestion in this thesis is that in public administration in post-socialist countries, instead of dominant anti-corruption scheme repression-prevention-transparency, corruption combat should be improved through the implementation of a new one, structure-conduct-performance. The implementation of this model is based on three regulatory pyramids: anti-corruption, disciplinary anti-corruption and criminal anti-corruption pyramid. This approach asks public administration itself to engage in corruption combat, leaving criminal justice system as the ultimate weapon, used only for the very harmful misdeeds.

Marginality and Integrity: Constructing of Gender Identities in the Post-Communist Bulgaria

Ms. Kotzeva's team aimed to reveal the formation of the new gender identities in the transitional society of Bulgaria since 1989. Their main conclusions (presented in a series of manuscripts written in Bulgarian and German, and also on disc) were reached on the basis of data obtained from a field survey involving a group of 190 women, and interviews conducted with a group of Bulgarian women politicians. Although approving of gender equality and the ideology of emancipation on an abstract level, women predominantly identify themselves with mothering and caring for the family. At the same time they do not fully surrender to their family obligations and support a strategy of balancing between family and extra-family activities. Bulgarian women are highly frustrated by the new requirements of the labour market, insecurity, and lack of safety in their personal life. Ms. Kotzeva and her team observed a high degree of convergence of self-identification strategies amongst Bulgarian women from different generations and educational backgrounds. On the other hand, women from the ethnic minorities, especially Gypsy women, demonstrate radically divergent styles of orientation and behaviour. Women's marginalisation due to the altering economic and political circumstances in Bulgaria, and the decline of female participation in Parliament, have clearly shown that the end of socialist women's politics must lead to critical reflection and the development of new strategies in order to enable women to take part in the process of a new elite in Bulgaria.

Post-War Writers' Memoirs in Romania and France: A Study of Mentalities

Ms. Net wanted to find out if there was what she terms a "collective identity of the intelligentsia" of Romania and France between 1945 and 1989. She conducted her research on a corpus of memoirs from both cultures, and in the process, uncovered some fundamental differences, which she presented in the form of a 178 page manuscript in English, and also on disc. One of the most basic appears to be that French memorialists rarely deal with social, historical and political changes and events. Ms. Net regards these writers as shutting their eyes to reality, and attempting to preserve the past. They are interested in their personal history, and in the genesis of their own works. According to Ms. Net, this tendency is so marked that she doubts whether 20th century French writers share the dominant mentalities of their times. In her opinion all this points to the fact that the French intelligentsia are "trying hard to preserve their cultural hegemony" a task which she maintains has always been an essential aspect of the identity of the French intellectual. In Romania, of course, the situation was very different. To take an example: many Romanian memoirs speak about the campaigns to improve the lot of women, while at the same time recognising and analysing the way that this was simply a "cover" for promoting the most incompetent people, men and women alike. They also express frustration at the way access to information was blocked due to the media being government controlled. Ms. Net concludes, eventually, that, in general, intellectuals, more than any other group in society, ensure the continuity of the dominant mentalities in a given cultural space. Consequently, she feels, we must revise the idea - or myth as she calls it - that intellectuals represent the avant-garde in a given society. Specifically, she concludes that petty bourgeois, patriarchal and elitist mentalities are still prevalent in France. The truth is, she reflects, that intellectuals are always true to their nature, no mater when and where they are living.

Scientific Institutions in a Society of Transition: Strategies of Modernisation

Kristina Petkova (Group Leader), Tzocho Boyadgiev, Galin Gornev, Ivan Tcholakov (Bulgaria), Martin Bauer (Switzerland). Scientific Institutions in a Society of Transition: Strategies of Modernisation. Ms. Petkova is involved in teaching and research in the Institute of Sociology of the Bulgarian Academy of Science and led this project, which was carried out between July 1995 and June 1997. The aims of this project were a) to outline the main adaptive strategies of scientific institutions in a situation of social transition, and b) to analyse the opportunities for mobilising public opinion in support scientific work. The group began from the assumption that the social representation of science reflects the historical development of society as a whole. They developed a theoretical model describing the position of science in the three main types of society in the world today (modern, post-modern, totalitarian) and carried out three types of investigation: a representative survey of the public understanding of scientific institutions in Bulgaria; an in-depth cross-national investigation (Bulgarian - Great Britain); and a content analysis of how science is represented in two national newspapers, the "Rabotnichesko Delo" and the "Daily Telegraph". The results showed that Bulgarian public opinion has a more standard view of science and a more optimistic vision of scientific development than do the British, but that there is a certain insensitivity to the risks of scientific results, etc. The group conclude that in order to survive, scientific institutions in Bulgaria should change their passive attitude and adopt active strategies in both their relationships with the state, and in their contacts with private business and with the institutions of civil society.

Tolerance and Critical Thinking

Post-soviet countries are in the process of transformation from a totalitarian order to a democratic one, a transformation which is impossible without a profound shift in people's way of thinking. The group set themselves the task of determining the essence of this shift. Using a multidisciplinary approach, they looked at concrete ways of overcoming the totalitarian mentality and forming that necessary for an open democratic society. They studied the contemporary conceptions of tolerance and critical thinking and looked for new foundations of criticism, especially in hermeneutics. They then sought to substantiate the complementary relation between tolerance and criticism in the democratic way of thinking and to prepare a a syllabus for teaching on the subject in Ukrainian higher education. In a philosophical exploration of tolerance they began with relgious tolerance as its first and most important form. Political and social interests often lay at the foundations of religious intolerance and this implicitly comprised the transition to religious tolerance when conditions changed. Early polytheism was more or less indifferent to dogmatic deviations but monotheism is intolerant of heresies. The damage wrought by the religious wars of the Reformations transformed tolerance into a value. They did not create religious tolerance but forced its recognition as a positive phenomenon. With the weakening of religious institutions in the modern era, the purely political nature of many conflicts became evident and this stimulated the extrapolation of tolerance into secular life. Each historical era has certain acts and operations which may be interpreted as tolerant and these can be classified as to whether or not they are based on the conscious following of the principle of tolerance. This criterion requires the separation of the phenomenon of tolerance from its concept and from tolerance as a value. Only the conjunction of a concept of tolerance with a recognition of its value can transform it into a principle dictating a norm of conscious behaviour. The analysis of the contemporary conception of tolerance focused on the diversity of the concept and concluded that the notions used cannot be combined in the framework of a single more or less simple classification, as the distinctions between them are stimulated by the complexity of the realty considered and the variety of its manifestations. Notions considered in relation to tolerance included pluralism, respect and particular-universal. The rationale of tolerance was also investigated and the group felt that any substantiation of the principle of tolerance must take into account human beings' desire for knowledge. Before respecting or being tolerant of another person different from myself, I should first know where the difference lies, so knowledge is a necessary condition of tolerance.The traditional division of truth into scientific (objective and unique) and religious, moral, political (subjective and so multiple) intensifies the problem of the relationship between truth and tolerance. Science was long seen as a field of "natural" intolerance whereas the validity of tolerance was accepted in other intellectual fields. As tolerance eemrges when there is difference and opposition, it is essentially linked with rivaly and there is a a growing recognition today that unlimited rivalry is neither able to direct the process of development nor to act as creative matter. Social and economic reality has led to rivalry being regulated by the state and a natural requirement of this is to associate tolerance with a special "purified" form of rivalry, an acceptance of the actiivity of different subjects and a specification of the norms of their competition. Tolerance and rivalry should therefore be subordinate to a degree of discipline and the group point out that discipline, including self-discipline, is a regulator of the balance between them. Two problematic aspects of tolerance were identified: why something traditionally supposed to have no positive content has become a human activity today, and whether tolerance has full-scale cultural significance. The resolution of these questions requires a revision of the phenomenon and conception of tolerance to clarify its immanent positive content. This involved an investigation of the contemporary concept of tolerance and of the epistemological foundations of a negative solution of tolerance in Greek thought. An original soution to the problem of the extrapolation of tolerance to scientific knowledge was proposed based on the Duhem-Quine theses and conceptiion of background knowledge. In this way tolerance as a principle of mutual relations between different scientific positions gains an essential epistemological rationale and so an important argument for its own universal status. The group then went on to consider the ontological foundations for a positive solution of this problem, beginning with the work of Poincare and Reichenbach. The next aspect considered was the conceptual foundations of critical thinking, looking at the ideas of Karl Popper and St. Augustine and at the problem of the demarcation line between reasonable criticism and apologetic reasoning. Dogmatic and critical thinking in a political context were also considered, before an investigation of critical thinking's foundations. As logic is essential to critical thinking, the state of this discipline in Ukrainian and Russian higher education was assessed, together with the limits of formal-logical grounds for criticism, the role of informal logical as a basis for critical thinking today, dialectical logic as a foundation for critical thinking and the universality of the contemporary demand for criticism. The search for new foundations of critical thinking covered deconstructivism and critical hermeneutics, including the problem of the author. The relationship between tolerance and criticism was traced from the ancient world, both eastern and Greek, through the transitional community of the Renaissance to the industrial community (Locke and Mill) and the evolution of this relationship today when these are viewed not as moral virtues but as ordinary norms. Tolerance and criticism were discussed as complementary manifestations of human freedom. If the completeness of freedom were accepted it would be impossible to avoid recognition of the natural and legal nature of these manifestations and the group argue that critical tolerance is able to avoid dismissing such negative phenomena as the degradation of taste and manner, pornography, etc. On the basis of their work, the group drew up the syllabus of a course in "Logic with Elements of Critical Thinking, and of a special course on the "Problem of Tolerance".

Family Anomie and Juvenile Deliquency in Post-Communist Romania

The sensitivity of crime rates to social, economic and political influences has long aroused the interest of sociologists who have attempted to explain what kind of relationships might be associated with variations in crime rates between different social groups at different times. The earliest views were put forward by Emil Durkheim, and while later writers have developed (R.K. Merton, L. Srole, A, K. Cohen, etc.) have developed some aspects of his ideas further, his basic ideas of the divorce of the individual from normative standards and the lack of social integration are still valid. Ms. Voicu-Minea looked at the theoretical background in detail but then limited it to a specific social group, the family, asking first why certain individual within vulnerable families and/or negative social influences commit offences while others do not. In modern times the family has undergone massive structural and functional changes. Its former economic function, which once endowed it with a great capacity for social inclusion, has generally vanished, while its formerly crucial role in children's education has been massively reduced. These changes, which are still not complete, can lead to dysfunction and in certain social contexts such as that in post-communist Romanian society, this risk of dysfunction is still greater as unfavourably social circumstances more easily affect such families. The number of cases of juvenile delinquency in Romania has increased sharply ever since the end of the communist system and in 1996 reached the level of 18,317 cases. The sample examined included 1012 juvenile delinquents aged between 14 and 18, taken from all areas of Bucharest. Over 80% of charges related to theft, with more serious offences being relatively rare. The children underwent a series of psychological tests, accompanied by a questionnaire relating to family situation. The results showed that juvenile delinquency in Romania is overwhelmingly male, with 91.8% of offences being committed by boys. Two thirds of the research group were under the age of 16 and only just over one third attended school, with over half having left school before the legal age. While the majority of subjects had a lower than average level of education, they did not always recognise this, with two thirds seeing their level of education as being as good as or better than average. Nearly half the children (43%) did not live with both natural parents and majority came from families with three or more children. This applied both to their original families and to the families in which they were living at the time of the survey. The overwhelming majority of families were living in or around Bucharest, but under one third originated from there. Almost 25% of parents were under-schooled and around one third were unqualified workers. At least 30% of families lived in inadequate accommodation and family incomes were generally low. Ms. Voicu-Minea does however point out that over half the minors from the sample saw their family income as satisfactory or even more than satisfactory. When factors such as bad relationships between parents, corporal punishment, alcohol consumption and criminal records of family members were taken into account, the picture was bleak, making it understandable why over 36% of subjects had run away from home at least once, and in many cases repeatedly and for longer periods. The overwhelming majority of offences (80.8%) were committed in groups of between 2 and 11 persons, usually "friends" but in about 10% of cases member's of the family. IQ tests put about 75% of the sample at slightly under average, the difference being too slight to account for the behaviour problems of the majority. Personality tests, however, showed a different picture. Over 70% of those tested manifested an acute need of tenderness and a similar number a high level of potential aggressiveness. Almost half of the minors expressed such feelings as intolerance or a desire for revenge, and Ms. Voicu-Minea found a clear weakness of the Self. Around half the sample expressed sentiments of abandonment, renunciation and solitude.

The meanings of pasture in resource degradation negotiations: Evidence from post-socialist rural Kyrgyzstan

Pasture use in the Kyrgyz Republic has changed significantly as a result of fundamental political, economic, and societal changes following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent changes in people’s livelihoods. Government institutions criticize current land use patterns as unsustainable and the cause of degradation. But at the local level, pasture quality is rarely seen as a major problem. This article uses a qualitative approach to examine the tension between these views and addresses current land use practices and related narratives about pasture degradation in rural Kyrgyzstan. By focusing on meanings ascribed to pastures, it shows how people closely relate current practices to the experiences and value systems of the Soviet period and to changing identities emerging in the post-Soviet transformation process. It argues that proper understanding of resource degradation issues requires adequate consideration of the context of meaning constructed by local resource users when they make sense of their environment.

Post-mortem angiography after vascular perfusion with diesel oil and a lipophilic contrast agent

OBJECTIVE: The objective of our study was to establish optimal perfusion conditions for high-resolution postmortem angiography that would permit dynamic visualization of the arterial and venous systems. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Cadavers of two dogs and one cat were perfused with diesel oil through a peristaltic pump. The lipophilic contrast agent Lipiodol Ultra Fluide was then injected, and angiography was performed. The efficiency of perfusion was evaluated in the chick chorioallantoic membrane. RESULTS: Vessels could be seen up to the level of the smaller supplying and draining vessels. Hence, both the arterial and the venous sides of the vascular system could be distinguished. The chorioallantoic membrane assay revealed that diesel oil enters microvessels up to 50 microm in diameter and that it does not penetrate the capillary network. CONCLUSION: After establishing a postmortem circulation by diesel oil perfusion, angiography can be performed by injection of Lipiodol Ultra Fluide. The resolution of the images obtained up to 3 days after death is comparable to that achieved in clinical angiography.

[Spontaneous and post-therapeutic cartilage repair: evaluation criteria.]

Articular cartilage has poor reparative capacities, and once damaged cartilage lesions remain chronic and can lead to osteoarthritis. Over the last decade, several innovative therapies have been introduced to promote the regeneration of articular cartilage while sustaining sufficient mechanical stress and permitting a pain free motion. An important measure of outcome is the morphological characterization of the repair tissue in order to allow for cross-study evaluation. The International Cartilage Repair Society has developed a analogue visual scale to quantify repair tissue, which is described in this paper.