| 1. |
- Engvall, Johan
(författare)
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Why are public offices sold in Kyrgyzstan?
- 2014
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Ingår i: Post-Soviet Affairs. - 1060-586X .- 1938-2855. ; 30:1, s. 67-85
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Why are public offices for sale in Kyrgyzstan? To address this question, this article attempts to set out a new logic for understanding the motives, nature, and consequences of corruption in the country. Rather than securing access to a single favor through bribery, officials invest in political and administrative posts in order to obtain access to stream of rents associated with an office. Political and administrative corruption is organically linked in this system, and corruption stems not so much from weak monitoring as from being a franchise-like arrangement, where officials are required to pay continuous fees to their bosses. The key is to be the public official influencing the redistribution of rents as well as participating in the informal market where public goods are privatized and exchanged for informal payments. Thus, instead of control over the pure economic assets of the state, influence over the state's institutional and organizational framework is the dominant strategy for earning and investing in the country.
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| 2. |
- Gentile, Michael, et al.
(författare)
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Housing allocation under socialism : the Soviet case revisited
- 2013
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Ingår i: Post-Soviet Affairs. - : Taylor & Francis (Routledge): SSH Titles. - 1060-586X .- 1938-2855. ; 29:2, s. 173-195
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Social or public housing is an important component of the housing supply in most European countries. Nowhere, however, has the notion of social housing been taken as far as in the countries that formerly were ruled by socialist regimes, most notably the Soviet Union. For this reason, it may be argued that the development of theorizations on housing has much to learn from this large but inconclusively studied example. One of the avowed virtues of socialism was that the system, in theory, guaranteed its subjects equal rights to housing. That this was not quite the case is well known in the literature, but in fact no robust evidence to support this view (or the contrary) has been presented so far. Therefore, this paper's aim is to investigate the functioning of the Soviet system of housing allocation, assessing its claims to social equity and justice. Based on a detailed case study of about 3500 Soviet-era housing allocation decisions made in Daugavpils, Latvia, at five points in time covering various stages in the development of Soviet power (full coverage of decisions made in 1953, 1960, 1970, 1980, and January-April 1990), we illustrate how much living space was allocated to whom. In addition, we detail the characteristics of the waiting times involved. We apply both descriptive and regression methods on our data-set, making a significant contribution to what is known about the outcome of housing allocation under socialism and, at a more general level, under strictly supply-constrained conditions.
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