Профессор Казухиро КУМО (Япония): Siberian Curse Revisited: Had Communist Planners Left the Soviet Union out in the Cold?

18 ноября  МШЭ МГУ состоится  очередной межкафедральный научно-исследовательский семинар по экономике и математическим методам.

Подробнее:

18 ноября  МШЭ МГУ состоится  очередной межкафедральный научно-исследовательский семинар по экономике и математическим методам.

Руководители: Беляков А.О., Курбацкий А.Н.

Секретарь: Мироненков А.А. | econometrics.math@gmail.com

На семинаре выступит Казухиро КУМО (профессор, Япония) /Kazuhiro KUMO(Professor, Research Division of Comparative and World Economics)

Тема доклада : Siberian Curse Revisited: Had Communist Planners Left the Soviet Union out in the Cold?

Аннотация: 

The well-known Hill and Gaddy (2004)’s “Siberian Curse” argued for the
inefficiency of spatial economies in the Soviet Union’s regional
development policy, taking that (1) Russia’s urban agglomeration has not
grown sufficiently and (2) the average temperature of the country
(temperature per capita, TPC), weighted by regional population,
continued to decline. This is shown by the fact that the Russian urban
system does not follow the rank-size rule or Zip’s law, and the
continuous decline of the TPC for the Russian Federation, which Hill and
Gaddy attributed to the legacy of the Soviet Union’s administrative and
command-oriented planned economy.

However, this study constructed a dataset of all cities in the former
Soviet republics from the entire population census and examined the
validity of the rank and size laws in each census year and the TPCs for
the Soviet Union as a whole, the Russian Federation and outside Russia,
which resulted in more comprehensive conclusions.

First, unlike the urban hierarchical structure of contemporary Russia,
the Soviet urban hierarchical structure conformed to the rank-size rule.
Secondly, the Soviet urban structure showed a deviation from the
rank-size rule between 1939 and 1959, but in the last years of the USSR
up to 1989, the Soviet hierarchical urban system conversely showed a
tendency to converge with the traditional Zipf’s law.

Then, this study embraces a broader geographical scope (the entire
pre-Soviet Russian Empire and the Soviet Union) and a wider
chronological window (from the late 19th century to the end of the
Soviet era). This allows the authors to unravel the claim that the
Soviet command-administrative system ushered in and perpetuated the
“economy of cold” by nuancing the historical trends of TPC within three
geographical loci: the Russian Empire/Soviet Union, non-Russia, and
modern Russia. The novel aspect of this study is that it reveals that
the declines in TPC were not persistent either chronologically or
geographically. Overall, the declines were most pronounced between 1939
and 1959 and were essentially confined to the territory of the modern
Russian Federation.

In these regards, the above observations are counter evidence to Hill
and Gaddy’s (2004) criticism of Soviet regional development policy. It
is possible to point out the problems associated with the approach of
limiting a geographical phenomenon that should be considered in the
entire Soviet Union to the Russian Federation alone.