The New Role of State Corporations in the Russian Economy

The Russian state corporations are prominent and often expand at the expense of private enterprises in several industries, notably banking, energy, machine-building and transportation. The state companies are functioning very differently from private enterprises. They benefit from cheap and ample capital and extraordinary regulatory advantages. Yet, they appear extremely inefficient and suffer by and large from poor governance. At this event, Anders Aslund, Senior Fellow, Peterson Institute for International Economics, and former Research Scholar, Kennan Institute, will argue that how state corporations go, Russia is likely to go.

Anders Åslund has been a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics since 2006, and is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. He is a leading specialist on East European economies with more than 35 years of experience in the field.

Dr. Åslund has worked as an economic adviser to the Russian, Ukrainian, and Kyrgyz governments. He is the author of eleven books, the last one with Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, How Latvia Came through the Financial Crisis. Other recent books of his are: The Last Shall Be the First: The East European Financial Crisis, 2008-10 (2010), How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy (2009), and Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed (2007). He has also edited 16 books and has published widely.

Previously, Dr. Åslund was the Director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He was the founding director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics and professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. Dr. Åslund served as a Swedish diplomat in Moscow, Geneva and Kuwait. He earned his doctorate from the University of Oxford.

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The Kennan Institute speaker series is made possible through the generous support of the Title VIII Program of the U.S. Department of State.