A Three-Sector Model of the Russian Virtual Economy

Agapov Stanislav, Svetlana Boyarchenko and Levendorsky Sergey ()

EERC Working Paper Series from EERC Research Network, Russia and CIS

Abstract: The Russian economy has evolved into a hybrid form, a partially monetized quasi-market system that has been called the virtual economy. In the virtual economy, barter and non-monetary transactions play a key role in transferring value from productive activities to the natural monopolies and loss-making sectors of the economy. The project aims at providing a consistent and multi-facet exposition of main features of the Russian virtual economy, and explains why it is different from other transition economies. In particular, the endogenous appearance of money substitutes and wide-spread use of non-monetary transactions are explained as a result of the optimizing behavior of agents in the economy, given the inherited distorted structure, the existence of large natural monopolies, the unproductive sector organized into informal networks, and the government policies aimed at the support of this sector. We highlight the typical distortions of the price system, and provide an explanation of the observed dynamics of the volume of money substitutes in circulation after August 1998 crisis. We show that the Russian virtual economy can be in one of two steady states with approximately the same price systems but essentially different volumes of money substitutes in circulation. Transition into the state with the smaller volume of money substitutes in circulation can be caused by an increase of the number of active producers resulting from some external shock. We conjecture that should the productive business activity be suppressed, then the economy can swiftly return to the former state with the large volume of money substitutes in circulation.

Keywords: Russia; money substitutes; search models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D42 D43 E52 O23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2003-02-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://eercnetwork.com/default/download/creater/w ... 67cdd8f7f82a2dc9.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eer:wpalle:02-06e

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
EERC Research Network, Russia and CIS, 92/94, Dmytrivska Str., suite 404, Kyiv, 01135 Ukraine
https://eercnetwork.com/paper

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EERC Working Paper Series from EERC Research Network, Russia and CIS EERC Research Network, Russia and CIS, 92/94, Dmytrivska Str., suite 404, Kyiv, 01135 Ukraine.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anton Pashchenko ().