TY  - JOUR
AU  - Shleifer,Andrei
AU  - Treisman,Daniel
TI  - A Normal Country
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 10057
PY  - 2003
Y2  - November 2003
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10057
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w10057.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Andrei Shleifer
Department of Economics
Harvard University
Littauer Center M-9
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: 617/495-5046
Fax: 617/496-1708
E-Mail: ashleifer@harvard.edu

Daniel Treisman
Department of Political Science
UCLA
4289 Bunche Hall
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1472
Tel: 310/794-5875
Fax: 310/825-0778
E-Mail: treisman@polisci.ucla.edu
AB  - During the 1990s, Russia underwent an extraordinary transformation from a communist dictatorship to a multi-party democracy, from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, and from a belligerent adversary of the West to a cooperative partner. Yet a consensus in the US circa 2000 viewed Russia as a disastrous and threatening failure, and the 1990s as a decade of catastrophe for its citizens. Analyzing a variety of economic and political data, we demonstrate a large gap between this perception and the facts. In contrast to the common image, by the late 1990s Russia had become a typical middle-income capitalist democracy.
ER  -