Testing Russia's Virtual Economy

Vlad Ivanenko ()

No 428, William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series from William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Abstract: In the aftermath of sovereign default of August 1998, the hypothesis of virtual economy in Russia developed by Gaddy and Ickes has gained popularity. The hypothesis states that the country has not moved towards free-market economy but developed a system of implicit price subsidization similar to what had existed before. Non-viable sectors that the state supported with subsidies before survive by over-pricing their output. Customers pass the bill back to the government by reducing their tax liabilities. We test the proposition that the distribution of the value-added across sectors is biased because of price distortions and estimate the distribution at world prices. The results support the claim that Russian price structure is different from the world level and three out of fifteen sectors, for which we construct price indices, become "value-destroying". We investigate the reasons behind price differentials and find that difference in processing and the use of barter explain a large part of it.

Keywords: Russia; virtual economy; virtual value-added (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: P2 P3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: pages
Date: 2001-12-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.wdi.umich.edu/files/Publications/WorkingPapers/wp428.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.wdi.umich.edu/files/Publications/WorkingPapers/wp428.pdf [302 Found]--> https://wdi.umich.edu/files/Publications/WorkingPapers/wp428.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:wdi:papers:2001-428

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in William Davidson Institute Working Papers Series from William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan 724 E. University Ave, Wyly Hall 1st Flr, Ann Arbor MI 48109. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by WDI ().