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Abstract
An intense discussion is taking place in international political economy on the influence of economic ideas on institutional change. Case studies so far have, however, mainly focused on the Western industrialised countries and research seems to be biased towards cases in which new ideas caused lasting institutional change. The present paper addresses these two shortcomings by analysing the case of the Russian Stabilisation Fund (SF). This case is an example both of the impact of global ideas on a non-Western emerging country and of a ‘near miss’ in the sense that imported neoliberal ideas failed to assert themselves enduringly. Paradoxically, it can be shown how the neoliberally based idea of the SF even contributed to the return to Soviet patterns of industrial policy. The main reason for this, we argue, is that the Fund's implementation was not preceded by economic and political debates. Accordingly, the imported institution of the SF had to be filled with ideational content after its implementation.
Acknowledgements
The present paper is the outcome of a multidisciplinary research network ‘Institutions and Institutional Change in Post-Socialism (KomPost)’ which is supported by the German Ministry of Science and Education (BMBF). It was presented at the XIV April Conference on Social and Economic Development of the Higher School of Economics (Moscow, April 2013), at a KomPost workshop on ‘The Limits of Ideational Transfer’ (Munich, April 2013) and at the research seminar of the Graduate School for East and South East European Studies of Ludwig-Maximilian University, Munich (Munich, December 2013).
We are very grateful to Petra Stykow, Ivan Boldyrev and three anonymous referees for their very helpful comments and suggestions on previous versions of the paper. All mistakes remain our own.
Notes on contributors
Ewa Dabrowska pursues a PhD in governance and public policy (Staatswissenschaften) at the University of Erfurt and works at the Hamburg Institute of Economics in the framework of the project Network Institutions and Institutional Change in Post-socialism. She is working on a monograph about the cognitive challenge of resource abundance on the example of the Russian SF.
Joachim Zweynert is Professor of IPE at Witten/Herdecke University, Germany. He has published widely on institutions and institutional change, particularly in Central Eastern and Eastern Europe, and he has written a series of articles on ideas and institutions in post-Soviet transition that were published in Europe-Asia Studies in 2006, 2007 and 2010.
Notes
1 The literature that does exist operates with much too large categories, such as ‘neoliberalism’, ‘shock therapy’ or ‘gradualism’ and often lacks a sound theoretical and empirical foundation. For this critique, see Dawisha and Ganev (Citation2005).
2 Putin's economic advisor 2000–2005.
3 Minister of finance 1999–2011.
4 Deputy minister of economic development and trade, 2006–2008, director of the finances and economic department in the Russian Prime Minister's office, 2008–2012, minister of economic development, 2012–2013, currently assistant (pomoshchnik) to the President of the Russian Federation. Belousov also holds a doktor nauk. He has thus defended a second dissertation roughly equivalent to a German Habilitationsschrift.
5 Deputy Prime Minister (since May 2012), deputy minister of economic development 2000–2004 and Putin's economic advisor 2004–2008, assistant to the President of the Russian Federation, 2008–2012.
6 Prime Minister, 2004–2007.
7 However, it should be noted that recently attempts have been made to escape the strict dichotomy between path dependence and critical junctures allowing for a more differentiated analysis, see e.g. Mahoney and Thelen (Citation2010). Our own case study speaks in favour of the need to take account of the fact that it is often a prerequisite for radical change that new ideas strike roots in traditional perceptions and ways of doing things. Still, the dichotomy was the starting point of the recent interest in ideas and institutions and is suited to illustrate what constitutes the basic question of this research.
8 Though certainly not the last word in the philosophy of science, Kuhn's Theory of Scientific Revolutions still constitutes the main reference point for scholars engaged in the recent discussion on ideas and institutional change. For an attempt to utilise the ideas of Imre Lakatos (admittedly also not the last word in the philosophy of science), see Zweynert (Citation2006).
9 On the distinction between a ‘sticky’ and a more ‘flexible’ version of historical institutionalism, see Bell (Citation2011).
10 This is particularly relevant for Russia as Russian economists are still far from being integrated into the global scientific community; see Libman and Zweynert (Citation2014).
11 A further rationale for the introduction of SFs is the ‘resource curse’, the empirically well-documented problem that resource-rich countries are often prone to corruption (and other calamities, such as authoritarianism, civil war, etc., that do not concern us here). By establishing an automatic cut-off mechanism, it is hoped to protect the resource income from rent-seeking and corruption. This argument did not play any role in the establishment of the Russian SF. However, for some Russian commentators the very fact of not spending and investing the fund domestically was a hint that it served as a slush fund for Russian authorities (Veller Citation2005; Vladimirova Citation2005).
12 In Russia, up to 2006 they were managed by the Ministry of Finance and since then by the Central Bank.
13 However, the idea of putting monetary wealth aside for future generations has a normative connotation that may be considered compatible with social-democratic rationale. The Norwegian SF indeed seems to reflect this rather than a neoliberal logic. However, saving money for future generations did not play any role in the debates around the implementation of a Russian SF. At the same time, the departure from the original logic also manifested itself in a stronger emphasis on the welfare aspects of the SF as expressed in the term ‘Fund of National Welfare’; see section ‘The end of the SF: 2007–2008'.
14 It should be stressed that this is not true of the later works of Egor Gaidar himself.
15 In December 2005 he stepped back from this position, protesting against the government's increasing departure from democratic principles.
16 Ministerstvo Ekonomicheskogo Razvitiya i Torgovli. In May 2008 the name of the ministry was changed to Ministerstvo Ekonomicheskogo Razvitiya, as the Ministry of Industry and Trade (Ministerstvo Promyshlennosti i Torgovli) was created that took over a part of former MERT responsibilities.
17 In fact, according to the calculations by Gurvich et al. (Citation2009: 38) between 2004 and 2007 about 75% of the additional oil revenue was absorbed by the SF.
18 Tsentr makroekonomiki i kratkosrochnogo prognozirovaniya.
19 For these biographical data, see www.economy.gov.ru/wps/wcm/connect/economylib4/en/home/press/news/doc20120521_002; http://ria.ru/spravka/20120521/654335328.html (accessed 17 February 2014).
20 He clearly admits that ‘according to this approach the micro-objects (forms, domestic economies [domokhozyaistva] and so on) are to a significant degree “unfree” in their behaviour: they are either subordinate to the forms of development of the whole or cease to exist’ (Belousov Citation2006: 10).
21 This emphasis on structural change rather than on material growth had been quite heretical in the Soviet Union and also bluntly contradicted Putin's 2003 announcement that GDP would be doubled by 2010. One may speculate that it could be due to the growing influence of Belousov that Putin has not made similar statements since.
22 We do not use ‘nationalist’ as a political label here but only state that these authors ascribe priority to national economic development very much in the sense of the ‘father’ of economic nationalism, Friedrich List.
23 According to the amendment which was passed on 23 November 2005, the IF was to be equipped with RUB 69.7 billion, while 72 billion were initially earmarked for 2007. In 2006, following a three-year financial plan, the latter figure was changed to RUB 110.6 billion. In 2008 an additional RUB 104.3 billion and in 2009 RUB 93.3 billion were to be transferred to the IF. The amount was rather negligible in comparison with the volume the SF reached at the end of 2006 and 2007 – RUB 2346.9 billion and 3849.1 billion, respectively (Drobyshevsky Citation2011: 131).
24 In 2009–2010, during the years of crisis management, most resources were spent. Since then, the MRD has hardly generated any new funds for the IF (authors’ interview with A. Klepach).
25 Empirical studies come to heterogeneous results as to how strong the correlation was, however. Whereas Gurvich et al. (Citation2009: 47) find that despite the SF ‘the amount of government spending depends significantly on oil prices,' Merlevede et al. (Citation2009) argue that between 2003 and 2007 the elasticity of the budget to the oil price had decreased so that the SF could partly be seen as a success. This view is shared by Tabata (Citation2007).
26 Despite its scientific reputation, for ideological reasons the Gaidar institute was no longer an acceptable source for a minister searching for politically credible scientific support.