At the end of 2007, just a few months before the end of his presidency, Vladimir Putin exercised Russia’s largest one-time public investment. To this end, he signed statutes creating several nonprofit nongovernmental organizations dubbed goskorporatsii, or “state corporations.” Four newly created entities received over 36 billion dollars cash from the state budget. Around the same time, two more state corporations came into being. Subsequently, they were entitled to own about 80 billion dollars worth of former state assets in the atomic and defense industry. The significance of these last-minute decisions is hard to overestimate. Apart from being the first massive investment of oil export revenues in the domestic economy, this was also the most significant redistribution of state property in post-Soviet Russia; critically-minded Minister of Finance Alexei Kudrin referred to it as a “covert form of privatization.” Was the creation of state corporations and their generous endowment a way for Putin to reward his cronies as he left the presidential office? Or was this an original institutional solution for investing oil revenues and boosting Russia’s infrastructural modernization and technological competitiveness? […]
Memo #:
25
Series:
2
PDF:
PDF URL:
http://www.gwu.edu/~ieresgwu/assets/docs/pepm_025.pdf
