Building Business in Post-Communist Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia Collective Goods, Selective Incentives, and Predatory States

Prior to 1989, the communist countries of Eastern Europe and the USSR lacked genuine employer and industry associations. After the collapse of communism, industry associations mushroomed throughout the region. Duvanova argues that abusive regulatory regimes discourage the formation of business associations and poor regulatory enforcement tends to encourage associational membership growth. Academic research often treats special interest groups as vehicles of protectionism and non-productive collusion. This book challenges this perspective with evidence of market-friendly activities by industry associations and their benign influence on patterns of public governance. Careful analysis of cross-national quantitative data spanning more than 25 countries, and qualitative examination of business associations in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Croatia, shows that postcommunist business associations function as substitutes for state and private mechanisms of economic governance. These arguments and empirical findings put the long-standing issues of economic regulations, public goods and collective action in a new theoretical perspective.

1. Introduction; 2. Collective action in adverse business environments; 3. Postcommunist business representation in a comparative perspective; 4. Business environment and business organization: the quantitative approach; 5. What you do is what you are: business associations in action; 6. Compulsory vs voluntary membership; 7. Conclusions.

Dinissa Duvanova is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Buffalo. Her research explores business-state relations, state regulatory quality and bureaucratic institutions. Native to the country of Kazakhstan, in 1998 she received the prestigious 'Bolashak' Presidential Scholarship, awarded to the top graduates of Kazakh universities. She was a recipient of the Foreign Language and Area Studies and the German Academic Exchange Service academic fellowships. After receiving her PhD from Ohio State University, she spent the 2007–8 academic year as a visiting scholar at the Princeton University Center for the Study of Democratic Politics. She was also awarded a Postdoctoral Fellowship by the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. In 2008, Duvanova joined the Department of Political Science at the University at Buffalo, where she researches the issues of regulatory intervention, bureaucratic discretion, civil service reforms and public accountability of state bureaucracy. Her work has been published in the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs and Europe-Asia Studies. Her current research projects are supported by the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo Law School.