Книги

In previous work BERKOWITZ and DEJONG, used regional commodity-price data covering the period 1993-96 to document the existence of an internal economic border that divides Russia into two distinct economic regions: the ‘Red Belt’ and the ‘rest of Russia’. The Red Belt represents a group of regions that have broadly resisted the implementation of federally initiated market reforms. Here, we extend this work by quantifying two economic implications of this internal border. First, we show that the Red-Belt border has limited the transmission of price signals to regions within the Red Belt. Second, we show that regions within the Red Belt have experienced extremely poor growth performances relative to Russia as a whole.