Inequality,democracy and taxation: Lessons from the post-communist transition

Using data for the period 1989 – 2002, we examine the determinants of income inequality in post-communist economies. We find a strong positive association between equality and tax collection but note that this relationship is significantly stronger under authoritarian regimes than under democracies. We also discover that countries introducing sustainable democratic institutions early are characterised by lower inequality. We also confirm that education fosters equality and find that larger countries are prone to higher levels of inequality.     

Entrepreneurs,expectations and business expansion: Lessons from Lithuania

This article applies a multinomial logit estimator to investigate which factors affect SME owners' expectations to grow their businesses in Lithuania. Our findings provide evidence that SME owners' human capital (education) matters and that growth expectations are positively related to exporting. In addition, we analyse the link between the perceptions of business constraints and growth expectations and find that the factors, which are perceived as main business barriers, are not necessarily those which are associated with reduced growth expectations. However, perceptions of corruption seem to affect growth expectations the most.     

Reviews

Jaan Valsiner, Developmental Psychology in the Soviet Union. Brighton, UK: The Harvester Press, 1988, x + 398 pp., £35.00 h/b, £12.95 p/b.

Archie Brown, ed., Political Leadership in the Soviet Union, London: Macmillan, 1989, xi + 245 pp., £35.00 h/b, £14.99 p/b.

Susan L. Clark, ed., Gorbachev's Agenda: Changes in Soviet Domestic and Foreign Policy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989, xviii + 422 pp., $35.95 p/b.

David Wedgwood Benn, Persuasion and Soviet Politics. London: Basil Blackwell, 1989, x + 243 pp., £25.00 h/b.

Karl‐Eugen Wädekin, ed., Communist Agriculture: Farming in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. London and New York: Routledge, 1989, xviii + 331 pp., £50.00

Gary Bertsch and Christopher T. Saunders, eds., East‐West Economic Relations in the 1990s. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, and Vienna: The Vienna Institute for Comparative Economic Studies, 1989, ix + 305 pp., £45.00.

Carl G. Jacobsen ed., Soviet Foreign Policy: New Dynamics, New Themes. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989, xv + 214 pp.

Sylvia Woodby, Gorbachev and the Decline of Ideology in Soviet Foreign Policy. Boulder: Westview Press, 1989, vii + 127 pp., $25.00 p/b.

Stephen J. Cimbala, Uncertainty and Control: Future Soviet and American Strategy. London: Pinter Publishers, 1990, viii + 183 pp., £28.00.

Alex Pravda and Peter J. S. Duncan eds., Soviet‐British Relations Since the 1970s. Cambridge, London: RIIA/Cambridge University Press, 1990, xii + 260 pp., £30.00.

Kirsten Amundsen, Soviet Strategic Interests in the North. London: Frances Pinter in association with John Spiers, 1990, x + 153 pp., £30.00.

Nicola Miller, Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1959–1987. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, ix + 252 pp., £25.00 or $39.50 h/b, £8.95 p/b.

Ilya Prizel, Latin America Through Soviet Eyes: the Evolution of Soviet Perceptions During the Brezhnev Era 1964–1982. Soviet and East European Studies, 72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, xiii+249 pp., £32.50, $44.50.

Milan Hauner, What is Asia to Us? Russia's Asian Heartland Yesterday and Today. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990, xvi + 264 pp., £30.00.

Michael Kirkwood, ed., Language Planning in the Soviet Union. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, in association with the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University of London, 1989, x + 230 pp., £35.00.

Andrei Gromyko, Memoirs. New York: Doubleday, 1990, pp. 414, $24.95.

Ihor Kamenetsky, ed., The Tragedy of Vinnytsia: Materials on Stalin's Policy of Extermination in Ukraine (1936–1938). Toronto, New York: The Ukrainian Historical Association, 1989, 286 pp., notes, bibliography, index, illustrations, $25.00 h/b.

Dov. B. Lungu, Romania and the Great Powers 1933–1940. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1989, xv + 293 pp., £44.55.

Paul LeBlanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party. London: Humanities Press International, 1990, xxxiv + 399 pp., £45.00.

Daniel Rancour‐Lafferiere, The Mind of Stalin: a Psychoanalytic Study. Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988, 161 pp., $17.95.     

Excavating Concealed Tradeoffs: How Russians Watch the News

Citizens in democracies are expected to make better decisions if they understand policy tradeoffs. However, politicians rarely have incentives to communicate them; citizens are uncomfortable choosing among valued outcomes; and devising a common metric is difficult. It is not surprising that in the United States the environment provides relatively little cuing or priming of tradeoffs in television news. Russian citizens, on the other hand, face a media environment in which tradeoff cuing is intentionally suppressed by owners' agendas, yet viewers detect concealed tradeoffs even in the absence of tradeoff priming and viewpoint diversity. Analysis of discourse among ordinary Russians in 16 focus groups convened in four cities, differentiated by political reform and media market environments, showed that when watching news in which tradeoffs are thoroughly concealed, viewers challenge stories by offering a broad spectrum of uncued tradeoffs. Tradeoffs come from diverse policy domains and represent a range of cognitive strategies, some of which are considerably more abstract than others and link elements of their observations and assumptions (together with what they can extract from the stories) into complex reasoning outcomes.