год 2010-й - более 30.000.000 обращений

This paper looks at two alternative approaches to organizing a local-level economy under very different, very difficult conditions: Russian regions trying to survive in the face of the Gaidar-Yeltsin period national policies and Chinese township and village government authorities trying to stimulate growth from a much lower level, but equally without significant assistance from the centre.

A. Russian Regional Survival Strategies

Local and regional-level decision-makers in Russia had to find ways to survive in an environment where the national government failed to build healthy market institutions and nearly abandoned the normal functions of dealing with the health, educational and welfare needs of the population. The conventional claim was: "the greater the ability of Moscow to push the pace of reform; the better the outcome". But rational decisions at the local level led to the adoption of economic and social policies that attempted to buffer the negative effects of national-level "shock" policies by creating market-mediating structures.

A high degree of local-level autonomy was widespread in Russia in 1991-1992 and continued in varying degrees since then. The so-called "Ulyanovsk model" has been used by many areas, including Tatarstan, Bashkortistan, Ryazan, Briansk, Krasnodar, Voronezh, Volgograd and Stavropol. The self-reinforcing economic logic of this approach centre on: use of a mixture of price-controlled and price-uncontrolled (but subsidized) markets for consumer goods; control and stabilization of local production for local consumption; and prevention of the simultaneous disruption/corruption of the wholesale and retail distribution channels. These policies facilitate the development of healthy "low criminalization" market processes, and are not anti-market, but was a good preparation for healthy market functioning, once more normal conditions emerged. They are "market-preserving", paying serious attention to the institutional requirements for successful market development

B. Reform-period China as a Source of Institutional Alternatives

At the beginning of the reform period in 1978 China faced many great and apparently insurmountable obstacles, compared to which the Russian situation was relatively simple. Key features of the Chinese reforms have included: keeping large state-owned enterprises (SOE) alive or where necessary organising their orderly decline; keeping most high technology "success" stories within the SOE sector and giving most DFI a SOE joint-venture partner; and allowing the co-existence of different types of property arrangements, included among which are the township and village enterprises (TVEs) and coastal enterprise zones

TVEs have proven to be unusually successful and dynamic economic entities, despite structural and behavioural features that would appear disabling when viewed from a standard perspective that emphasises the need for clearly established property rights and strong individual incentives. During the last decade rapid overall growth continued, within which the TVEs have grown even more rapidly, while the number of loss making SOEs has sharply risen, especially the small, locally-subordinated SOEs (so-called local-SOEs). Many of these local-SOEs have been or are being directly taken over by township and local governments. At the same time the organizational forms of both existing TVEs and existing purely private entities have begun to change to that of joint-stock co-operatives or joint-stock partnerships.

Key features of TVE "system" are that: the townships (and some villages) "have" or "own" multiple enterprises; enterprises have multiple masters with resulting ambiguous ownership rights; and there are virtually no subsidies available from the center so there is apparently a binding budget constraint. At the same time there is much cross-subsidization within the local area and few real bankruptcies. Bankruptcies have generally been a re-organizational tool, through which the enterprise is simply put under the control of another instrumentality of the same township or village government.

By the mid-1990s TVE employment had grown to more than 60 million and the array of products widely proliferated and moved to export-level quality. By 1997 the GDP share was more than 30%, along with 46.3% of all Chinese exports and more than half of industrial value-added, output and profits. Since TVEs are mostly the property of local government units, their earnings are available to finance continuing support of social services and housing construction.

C. Implications of Chinese Municipal Market Socialism for Russia and other CIS Countries

The dynamism and sustained success of the TVE disproves the core assumption of most Western economic advice in Russia -- that Anglo-American-style ownership forms must be adopted quickly and exclusively to have success. Despite the obvious connections between the institutional needs of Russian local-level authorities and the lessons of the Chinese case, there has been a failure to notice or admit: that much Russian and other FSU privatization is provisional; that local government ownership is already important; and there are both structural and behavioral reasons to expect further development in this direction. The survival pressures bearing down on regional administrations are likely to encourage adoption of certain features of the Chinese reform path, specifically the rise of some form of local social ownership of small and medium-sized productive enterprises..

And over the last two years there has been a little discussed wave of "de-privatisation" in Russia, which directly raises the possibility of more local-level ownership and operation of small- and medium-scale productive enterprises. Many failed and/or corruptly privatized assets that fall out of "private hands" may well land in "public, but not national government hands". It is possible to hope that in a few years Russia (away from Moscow and a few other large cities) will have acquired something analogous to the Chinese mixture of local institutional forms. Thus the classical form of the Chinese TVE may well be a realistic option in light of the current Russian policy dead-end on both "fiscal federalism" and "enterprise reform".

A direct policy prescription would be for local adoption in Russia of both Chinese institutional empiricism and certain specific TVE-type institutional forms. The Chinese experience cannot be simply and directly copied, but need not be. It opens up the range of possibilities for other transition economies. But this also leaves open the behavioral question of the extent to which Russian, Ukrainian, etc., local government bodies can come to exhibit Chinese-type functional features? Can binding budget constraints emerge under contemporary Russian conditions? There are already few subsidies from the center, but oblast and city governments may not take the tough managerial approach to their enterprises that have characterized most local-level authorities in China.

There is every reason to expect a Chinese-type ownership structure to emerge in Russia and no reason not to expect the same kind of incentive logic to work there, if sufficiently open operating conditions can be established. Both understanding in greater detail how this approach worked in China and finding ways in which these forces can be mobilized in contemporary Russian and other CIS conditions are vital tasks for public policy research.

D. Transparency and Local-level Accountability are Active Remedies

A powerful force behind the Chinese TVE reforms of the last decade has been the belief that the market-tested virtues of locally-organized industry (TVEs) are improved by even greater transparency and accountability, strictly at the local level. The proliferation of the joint-stock co-operative and joint-stock partnerships forms is a reflection of this reform dynamic, which has a strong basis-democracy aspect in a system generally thought to remain highly authoritarian. Most of these new forms are what are called closed co-operatives in western usage. In the Chinese case the local government is often a large "external" shareholder. It seems to me that the applicability of this initiative to the Russian and CIS environment is straightforward and promising.