
Vladimir PopovNew Economic School
Vladimir Popov
Ph.D.
About
196
Publications
43,185
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
2,035
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
February 2016 - present
Russian Academy of Sciences, Central Economics and Mathematics Institute
Position
- Senior Researcher
Position
- Research Director
Education
September 1971 - July 1976
Publications
Publications (196)
This paper is an empirical test of what is called a unified theory of inequality and growth (Galor and Zeira, 1988, 1993; Galor and Moav, 2004; Galor, 2012) – in early stages of industrialization inequality enhanced the process of development by channeling resources towards individuals whose marginal propensity to save is higher, thus enhancing phy...
The previous research with incomplete data revealed that zemstva were spending more per capita in regions with low level of education, but these spending did not make much of a difference – human capital in these regions remained relatively low (Popov, Konchakov, Didenko, 2024). The results reported in this paper provide additional and more rigorou...
Only in recent years Western countries have frozen foreign exchange reserves of Libya (2011), Iran (2012), Venezuela (2019), Afghanistan (2021), and Russia (2022). Other countries could be also targeted under many different pretexts - from violations of human rights and lack of democracy to insufficient support of sanctions against Russia and other...
This paper aims at providing additional explanations of the shift in electoral preferences studied by Piketty (2018) – in the post-war period rich and educated voters in Western countries shifted from right-oriented to left-oriented political parties.
It is argued that high income individuals develop leftist views (in favor of redistribution, i.e...
In 2020, after decades of “great international circulation” – a strategy of pursuing economic growth and development through export-oriented production – China announced that it would adopt a “dual-circulation” strategy. As was argued, “this means that, while China will continue to engage with global markets and supply chains, it will rely on domes...
The current process of moving away from the US dollar as a reserve currency will cause the outflow of capital from the US, leading to the depreciation of the dollar and/or increase in the interest rates that will cause costly real restructuring – reallocation of resources from less competitive to more competitive export-oriented industries accompan...
The key question of the economic and social post-reform history of Russia (after the agrarian reform of 1861) is what exactly led to the revolutions of the early 20th century. Were these revolutions a natural result of the growth of social tensions due to the flawed “Prussian path” of the development of capitalism in agriculture (a combination of l...
The debate between shock therapists and gradualists that centered on the issue of the pace of liberalization, privatization and stabilization overlooked the crucial importance of institutions for economic growth. The magnitude of the decline (transformational recession) was determined mostly by the initial conditions (distortions in industrial stru...
Overall the record of the Soviet Union in maintaining economic growth and high level of welfare indicators is quite spectacular, especially until the mid-1960s. The major strength of the CPE in the 1950-70s came from its ability to mobilize savings and to turn them into investment. After the Second World War the “big push” (industrialization) of th...
One view in the literature is that the East Asian economic model is superior to other models in the Global South (i.e. in the developing world), at least in terms of catch-up development and possibly even in innovations beyond the technological frontier. Unlike economic models in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, the East Asian model prioritize...
After the Second World War British industry was oriented towards the markets of former colonies, where the standards of efficiency and quality were not that high, so it was gradually loosing competitiveness as compared to its European counterparts. Britain was falling behind continental Europe in productivity and personal income until it entered th...
Even before the war in Ukraine of 2022 and even before the ‘Russian-hackers-undermine-US-democracy’ campaign of 2016, Russian-American relations had degraded to a level not seen since the 1950s. Why? Today the US has fewer ideological disagreements with Russia than it had with the USSR during the Cold War. Nowadays Russia is a capitalist market eco...
Among the many explanations of the deep transformational recession in the post-communist economies during the transition from a centrally planned economy to market economy in the 1990s there is one that considers this recession as a statistical fiction: the elimination of “unneeded under a less wasteful economic system” output, such as defense good...
The debate between the US and China about the responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic raises important questions about the obligations of national governments in the global health care domain. Whereas the US attempts to put the blame on China do not have any serious legal or moral justifications, there is certainly a rationale for the establishmen...
One view in the literature is that the East Asian economic model is superior to other models in the Global South (i.e. in the developing world), at least in terms of catch-up development and possibly even in innovations beyond the technological frontier. Unlike economic models in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, the East Asian model prioritize...
This book is an attempt to analyse the unfavourable developments in the dynamics of mortality and life expectancy in post- communist countries in the global context. It appears that this mortality crisis in post-communist countries has a lot of similarities with the recent unfavourable developments in health status in developed countries and many d...
The widely held belief that China’s undervalued exchange rate has been crucial to its rapid industrialization and economic growth over the last four decades is critically qualified and nuanced. In any case, renminbi (RMB) appreciation, rising wages with exhaustion of its labour surplus, growing domestic demand and slowing international trade and gr...
A small part of the slowdown of growth in China in the recent decade may be due to the decline in population growth. The major factor contributing to China’s growth slowdown has been the reversal of earlier policies resulting in foreign exchange reserve accumulation. The resulting pressure for the currency to appreciate undermined the international...
Most of the time the budget constraints in the socialist economies were harder than in developing countries and no less hard than in developed countries. The soft budget constraints (SBC) in socialist economies were not pervasive, as most authors believe, but selective, i.e. involved subsidization of some enterprises/industries at the expense of th...
2020 world economic downturn associated with the restrictions intended to fight COVID-19 pandemic is a structural recession caused by adverse supply shock. It is similar to recessions caused (or aggravated) by post war conversion of defense industries, by oil price shocks (1973, 1979, 2007), and by the transition to the market in post-communist cou...
The debate between the US and China about the responsibility for the COVID-19 pandemic raises important questions about the obligations of national governments in the global health care domain. Whereas the US attempts to put the blame on China do not have any serious legal or moral justifications, there is certainly a rationale for the establishmen...
Since the economic calculation debate of the 1920-30s, it is known that it is impossible to create a coherent balanced plan that equates supply and demand of millions of goods and services in the national economy, not to speak about the optimal plan. It is not well understood, though, how the centrally planned economy (CPE) really functioned and wh...
The article examines the reasons for the superior performance of East Asia in containing the human and economic costs of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. The East Asian model is based on solidarity and priority of collective interests over individual interests, whereas the Western model emphasizes competition and guarantees of individual rights. The...
1. Recent Russian inflation is mostly of demand pull, not cost push origin. The arguments that structural and institutional barriers in the economies in transition with imperfect markets may cause cost-push inflation of over 100% a year do not hold neither theoretically, nor empirically.
2. Despite the predominantly monetary origin of the Russian...
The relationship between inequality and happiness is counter-intuitive. This applies to both inequality in income and wealth distribution overall and also inequality at the very top of the wealth pyramid, as measured by billionaire intensity (the ratio of billionaire wealth to GDP).
First, billionaire intensity appears to be higher in countries w...
- Is industrial policy necessary for successful development or the market “knows” better, how to allocate resources?
- If industrial policy is needed, how to select industries that need to be supported?
- What are the appropriate tools / instruments to support particular industries?
Eastern European countries in general did not have any explicit i...
The extent of misperceptions of political events and developments is assumed to be largely determined by the rate of press freedom characterising each country (Reporters sans frontiers (RSF) 2018). Following that line of argument, only about one third of all countries worldwide would turn out to be in a good (Scandinavia, Germany) or satisfactory (...
Agricultural productivity in the Central Asian republics of the USSR stopped growing from the late 1970s and declined in the 1990s when the transition to the market occurred. As a result, most agricultural goods were uncompetitive on the both the domestic market and the world market, and the agricultural trade balance deteriorated as imports grew f...
In the 1980s, six former southern republics of the USSR (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan), like other former Soviet republics, traded very intensively both between themselves and with the other Soviet republics, but had a meagre volume of trade with the rest of the world. After the transition to the mark...
The volume examines macroeconomic policies for developing countries. The chapters analyse the kind of macroeconomic policies that are more conducive to inclusive and sustainable growth in developing countries. They also investigate whether particular fiscal, monetary, and exchange-rate policies have similar effects in developed and developing count...
The volume examines macroeconomic policies for developing countries. The chapters analyse the kind of macroeconomic policies that are more conducive to inclusive and sustainable growth in developing countries. They also investigate whether particular fiscal, monetary, and exchange-rate policies have similar effects in developed and developing count...
在 经济史的轨迹中,东西方生产力水平和人均收入差距持续扩大的“大分岔”问题一直吸引着经济学、政治学、社会学和哲学领域的研究者 持续不断地探寻其答案的热门问题。同时,二十世纪中期以后的苏联和中国所进行的经济改革,是缩小东西方发展水平差距的重要经济史事实。波波夫教授通过挖掘 西方创富的历史史实,从制度层面解密了“李约瑟问题”。然而,在发展中国家追赶西方发达国家的道路上,却只有少数的国家实现了经 济上的“赶超式”发展。其中,苏联和中国的政治经济改革模式极具典型性。同为通过暴力革命而走上社会主义道路的大国,苏联是短暂 的经济繁荣后便走向国家解体的命运,而中国自改革开放以后是经济持续高速增长且社会秩序稳定的命运。对比两国的政治经济改革结果,中国“经济 发展奇迹”的创造模式值得发展中国家所深思。在西方话...
Research on the health outcomes of globalisation and economic transition has yielded conflicting results, partly due to methodological and data limitations. Specifically, the outcomes of changes in foreign investment and state ownership need to be examined using multilevel data, linking macro-effects and micro-effects. We exploited the natural expe...
This paper reviews catch-up growth in various parts of the world, especially in the twentieth century, with a particular focus on what this implies for the Global South. In 1950, US per capita national income, adjusted for purchasing power, was nearly five times the world average. Since then, Western Europe and Japan have closed their per capita in...
Rich and well-developed tax havens, such as Cyprus, Guernsey, Hong Kong, Monaco, and Lichtenstein, attract many billionaires, but other less developed countries with zero or low personal income taxes (such as the Persian Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, UAE) have relatively few. Unsurprisingly, the happiness index is a strong predictor...
There is evidence that income and wealth inequalities are positively
associated with happiness, as measured by the happiness index, and
negatively associated with suicide rates, which are seen as objective
indications of unhappiness. Moreover, there is some evidence that
happiness is also positively linked to murder rates, especially when
they go h...
The extent of misperceptions of political events and developments is assumed to be largely determined by the rate of press freedom characterizing each country (Reporters sans frontiers, RSF, 2018). Following that argument, only about one third of all countries worldwide would turn out to be in a good (Scandinavia, Germany) or satisfactory (the US,...
Background:
Research on the health outcomes of globalisation and economic transition has yielded conflicting results, partly due to methodological and data limitations. Specifically, the outcomes of changes in foreign investment and state ownership need to be examined using multilevel data, linking macro-effects and micro-effects. We exploited the...
The chapter reviews catch-up or converging growth in parts of the Global South. By 1950, US per capita national income, adjusted for purchasing power, was nearly five times the world average. Since then, Western Europe and Japan have closed their per capita income gaps with the USA. East Asia, South Asia and some other developing countries have als...
This book identifies possible factors responsible for the recent rise of many developing countries. It examines how robust these trends actually are and speculatively predicts the implications and consequences that may result from a continuation of these trends. It also suggests possible scenarios of future development. Ultimately, it argues that t...
Background Population-level data suggest that economic disruptions in the early 1990s increased working-age male mortality in post-Soviet countries. This study uses individual-level data, using an indirect estimation method, to test the hypothesis that fast privatisation increased mortality in Russia. Methods In this retrospective cohort study, we...
Background
Population-level data suggest that economic disruptions in the early 1990s increased working-age male mortality in post-Soviet countries. This study uses individual-level data, using an indirect estimation method, to test the hypothesis that fast privatisation increased mortality in Russia.
Methods
In this retrospective cohort study, we...
Background
Previous research using routine data identified rapid mass privatisation as an important driver of mortality crisis following the collapse of Communism in Central and Eastern Europe. However, existing studies on the mortality crisis relying on individual level or routine data cannot assess both distal (societal) and proximal (individual)...
https://issek.hse.ru/en/news/172190256.html
The aim of the study was to identify Russia’s most promising areas of science and technology that are capable of playing an important role in solving various social and economic issues and realising the country’s competitive advantages. The Foresight examines current global challenges, the windows of oppo...
The dynamics of the exchange rate of the Russian ruble is considered in the context of the discussions on the optimal exchange rate regimes. It is shown that the dominant focus on the stability of the nominal exchange rate was erroneous. Since the prices in Russia grew faster than in the countries-its trading partners, this policy led to an overval...
Income and wealth inequalities in most countries - in the West, the former communist economies and in many developing states - have been growing in the last three decades. Inequalities in the late XIX century were much higher than before the rise of workers' movements in the West and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the strong inequalities of the pre...
The reversal of the trend towards the decline in income inequalities in the last three decades in most countries created favorable grounds for the rise of nationalist and anti-globalization feelings. Economic
failures of countries, groups of people and individuals are among important factors that cause nationalism.
The rise of nationalism in many...
Vor zwanzig Jahren, unmittelbar nach dem Beginn des Transformationsprozesses, beherrschte die akademische wirtschaftspolitische Diskussion eine Auseinandersetzung zwischen Schocktherapeuten, die sich für radikale Reformen und raschen Wandel aussprachen, und Gradualisten, die einen bedächtigeren und schrittweisen Reformansatz befürworteten. Die Scho...
Income and wealth inequalities in most countries – in the West, the former communist economies and in the developing world –have been on the rise in the last three decades with some notable exceptions. Inequalities in the nineteenth century were much higher than before the Industrial Revolution. Following the rise of workers’ movements in the West...
This paper discusses Uzbekistan’s recent experience with structural shifts and industrial policy, with a particular focus on various industry policy instruments, and its implications for the existing theories of industrial policy. In particular, two major hypotheses are discussed: (1) the hypothesis of Haussmann, Hwang and Rodrik (the more technolo...
Russian Abstract: В статье исследуется долговременная траектория роста развивающихся стран. До 16 века все страны находились примерно на одном уровне экономического развития, но затем страны, которые мы сегодня называем западными, стали расти быстрее остальных. К 1950г. США, наиболее развитая страна Запада, достигла ВВП на душу по ППС почти 5 раз в...
This paper examines the trajectory of growth in the Global South. Before the 1500s all countries were roughly at the same level of development, but from the 1500s Western countries started to grow faster than the rest of the world and PPP GDP per capita by 1950 in the US, the richest Western nation, was nearly 5 times higher than the world average....
The rise of the West is often attributed the presence of certain features in Western countries from the 16th century that were absent in more traditional societies: the abolition of serfdom and Protestant ethics, the protection of property rights, and free universities. The problem with this reasoning is that, before the 16th century, there were ma...
Utopian socialists believed that socialism is inevitable because it is a more rational system to organize production and life, a system more in line with the "good" nature of human beings. Marxism rejected this reasoning replacing it with what is known as historical materialism: social systems, it argued, emerge, develop and die not because they co...
Uzbekistan in recent 10 years is an extremely successful economy – high growth (8%), low domestic and international debt, undervalued exchange rate, relatively even distribution of income, creation from scratch competitive export oriented auto industry. It is important though to avoid “dizziness from success” and to envisage possible growth traps i...
Russian Abstract: В последние 10 лет Узбекистан развивался очень успешно – рост ВВП в среднем на 8%, низкий государственный и внешний долг, заниженный валютный курс, равномерное распределение доходов, создание с нуля конкурентоспособной автопромышленности, ориентированной на экспорт. Задача на будущее – не допустить «головокружения от успехов», пре...
Why even after the dramatic increase in inequality in the 1990s and after the emergence and enrichment of “oligarchs”, the alternative (leftist, social democratic) economic policies that could have improved material and social wellbeing of the majority of the population is not supported by this majority? It is argued that in immature democracies (w...
Почему после резкого увеличения неравенства в 90-е годы прошлого века, после появления и стремительного обогащения «олигархов», альтернативная (левая, социалдемократическая) экономическая политика, которая могла бы улучшить материальное и социальное положение значительного большинства населения не поддерживается этим большинством? В статье доказыва...
The conventional explanation for the dynamics of output during transition is associated with “good” and “bad” economic policies, in particular with the progress achieved in the liberalization, as measured by the liberalization index, and with the success or failure in macroeconomic stabilization, as measured by the rates of inflation. This paper se...
Review of the book by G. Kolodko “From Shock to Therapy. The Political Economy of Postsocialist Transformation”.In general, from all points of view, the dynamics of the government expenditure during transition seems to be by far the more important factor of successful transformation than the speed of reforms. Keeping the government big does not gua...
The Handbook represents a comprehensive study of the Russian economy. Written by a team of distinguished Russian and western authors, the chapters analyze the current economic situation, trace the impact of Soviet legacies and of post-Soviet transition, examine social challenges, and propose directions for reforms. The Handbook begins with economic...
Inter-country income inequalities now account for about two-thirds of world inequality, with intra-country inequality accounting for only a third. Global income inequality narrowed in the post-second world war decades before the Reagan-Thatcher revolutions and then the Washington Consensus shifted the balance of power. Recent trends in the function...
The World Economic and Social Survey 2013 is the annual flagship publication on major development issues prepared by the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat (UN/DESA). The WESS 2013 aims towards contributing to the deliberations on sustainable development with a focus on three important crosssectoral issues:...
Some major trends in world income inequalities and relevant economic trends are reviewed here. In recent decades, there have been indications of a reversal of the growing income divergence between North and South after over half a millennium, especially in the last two centuries. Meanwhile, income inequalities within most countries have been growin...
Uzbekistan is not usually considered an economic success story, but in fact it is: its GDP increased since 1989 more than in any other post-communist country, except for China, Vietnam and Turkmenistan. The success of Uzbekistan is very much similar to the Chinese – gradual economic reforms with the preservation of the capacity of state institution...
This chapter considers why certain transition economies successfully pursued policies other than the radical economic liberalization (shock therapy) normally credited for the economic success of CEEs. First, optimal policies are context-dependent: they are specific to each stage of development and what worked in Slovenia cannot be expected to work...
Maintaining today’s global imbalances would help overcome the major disproportion of our times — income gap between developed and developing countries. This gap was widening for 500 years, since the XVI century, and only now, in recent 60 years, there are some signs that this gap is starting to decrease. The chances to close this gap sooner rather...
This paper looks at Russian experience with austerity programmes since the breakdown of the former Soviet Union in 1991. Downsizing
of the state was one of the major elements in a reform package designed to transform the centrally planned economy into a
market one (together with deregulation, privatisation, macroeconomic stabilisation and the openi...
The goal of this study is to reveal the long-term trajectory of Russian economic development and to make predictions for the future. We start with a much discussed question: Why did Russia do worse economically during transition than most other countries in Europe and Asia? It is argued that it was caused partly by objective circumstances before tr...
If there is a negative terms of trade or financial shock leading to the deterioration in the balance of payments, there are two basic options for a country that has limited foreign exchange reserves. First, a country can maintain a fixed exchange rate (or even a currency board) and wait until the reduction of foreign exchange reserves leads to the...
Sustainable development requires a fundamental, global green technological transformation
over the next 30 to 40 years. Otherwise, it will be impossible to simultaneously meet the goals
of ending poverty and averting the catastrophic impacts of climate change and environmental
degradation.The UN's World Economic and Social Survey 2011 (WESS 2011) e...
The goal of this study is to reveal the long-term trajectory of Russian economic development and to make predictions for the future. The study starts with a much discussed question: why Russia did worse economically during transition than most other countries in Europe and Asia? It is argued that it was partly caused by objective circumstances befo...
Articles have been published repeatedly in the pages of >i>Voprosy ekonomiki>/i> in which attempts have been made to prove that the exchange rate of the ruble was artificially made too high, that a devaluation was not only desirable but essential to stimulate growth in exports and production, and that if one was not carried out "from above," then i...
Why indeed? Is it not obvious that a normal, full-fledged, developed market is inconceivable without private property? The term "socialist market" is by definition a contradiction, is just as nonsensical as the expression "socialist cold" because the market, like a cold, either exists or does not exist. There is no third possibility. Either sociali...
In June-August 1997, a sharp devaluation of the currencies of the countries of Southeast Asia (SEA) occurred owing to the outflow of short-term capital; the Thai baht decreased in value by almost 30 percent by September, and the currencies of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines by 15-20 percent. The second act of the drama began at the end of...
В 2007 –20 08 гг. экономический и социальный отдел ООН опубликовал сeрию
работ, названныx «Национальные стратегии развития». В них критически анализируются достижения и провалы развивающихся стран в соответствующих
сферах экономической политики — макроэкономическoй, технологическoй
и инвестиционнoй, внешнеторговoй, социальнoй, в отношении госпредпр...
While developing countries as a group did better than developed countries in 2008-09 recession, transition economies – former communist countries – experienced the largest reduction of output. Out of 42 countries that experienced negative growth in 2007-09, 13 were transition economies. In fact, 4 out of 5 most affected economies were former commun...
According to a narrow definition, institutional capacity of the state is the ability of the government to enforce laws and regulations. There are a lot of subjective indices (control over corruption, rule of law, government effectiveness, etc.) that are designed to measure the state institutional capacity and are based on experts’ estimates. The lo...
Strict protection of IPR can have a negative effect on economic development. Regression of economic growth on these indices produces conventional results (positive effect of stricter protection of IPR on growth) only if indices of institutional capacity (government effectiveness, control over corruption) are not included into the right hand side. I...
Maintaining today’s global imbalances would help to overcome the major disproportion of our times – income gap between developed and developing countries. This gap was widening for 500 years and only now, in the recent 50 years, there are some signs that this gap is starting to decrease. The chances to close this gap sooner rather than later would...
Why many transition economies succeeded by pursuing policies that are so different from the radical economic liberalization (shock therapy) that is normally credited for the economic success of central European countries? First, optimal policies are context dependent, they are specific for each stage of development and what worked in Slovenia canno...
The formal comparison of similarities and differences of Chinese and Western economic models misses the most important point. The uniqueness of China is that it looks very much like a developed country today in terms of institutional capacity of the state, even though it is a developing country according to GDP per capita. Indeed, China should be c...
If there is a negative terms of trade or financial shock leading to the deterioration in the balance of payments, there are two basic options for a country that has limited foreign exchange reserves. First, a country can maintain a fixed exchange rate (or even a currency board) and wait until the reduction of foreign exchange reserves leads to the...
This paper examines the impact that development theories have had on development policies, and the inverse impact of actual successes and failures in the global South on development thinking. It is argued that development thinking is at the cross-roads. Development theories in postwar period went through a full circle – from Big Push and ISI to neo...