Reforming Regional-Local Finance in Russia

The book provides a careful description of where Russia is today in developing fiscal federalism. By focusing mainly on regional-local finance, this book is intended to complement and in some ways update Russia's Transition to a New Federalism (Martinez-Vazquez and Boex 2001). Thus, the shift of focus from the federal-regional relations reflects an evolution of policy agenda in Russia. The second major contribution of this book is presenting an analytical framework - reviewing of what we know about and how we think about federalism. This framework covers all "building blocks" of federalism: size and structure of jurisdictions, expenditures, revenues, transfers, and borrowing. The exposition is not academically oriented but presents the essential issues in a practical manner and provides more rigorous discussion in appendices to individual chapters. The intensive application of theory and practice of federalism to the Russian setting results in a comprehensive assessment of the state of intergovernmental fiscal relations in Russia today. This assessment enables the authors to suggest options for reforms based on international practices and normative principles and identify some dangers contained in the pending reform proposals.Timofeev, Andrey is the author of 'Reforming Regional-Local Finance in Russia ', published 2006 under ISBN 9780821365571 and ISBN 0821365576.