Federalism with a Russian face: regional inequality, administrative capacity and regional budgets in Russia

The paper reviews fiscal federalism in Russian practice. Central control over sub-national budgets has tended to increase. In the classic literature on fiscal federalism such centralisation is potentially damaging to both static efficiency and growth. The paper reviews the propositions in that literature and the assumptions made in it, and notes that weak administrative capacity at sub-regional level, weak electoral competition and extreme unevenness of economic development across regions may provide grounds for greater central control than is treated as desirable in the established literature. The patterns of budgetary transfers from national to regional level are analysed and conclusions drawn about the effectiveness of the evolving fiscal-federal system in Russia.     

Hoebel's crucible

The study of subgroup law through recorded and reconstructed cases presents several analytic problems for the relationship between case content and subgroup practices. The greater the relative structural strength of a social system the greater the mythical content of its communications related to “outside” worlds. Constructing structural models of legal systems in contact, and typifying the information content of cases in structural situations, can inform analysis of case content as mythical, politically normative, or representative of subgroup behavior outside of legal forums. Anthropologists and French structural historians can work together to examine structural indicators which signify analytic boundaries for case analysis.