Economic Crises in Post‐Communist Russia

Abstract

This paper is concerned with combined crises of the 1990s and 2000s in post‐Communist Russia and the evolution of a conservative fiscal anti‐crisis policy to address them. Against the background of transformation restructuring, external shocks, cyclical downswings, and, sometimes, social unrest, policy makers consistently aimed to foster economic growth, while controlling inflation. Successive crises resulted in a gradual shift of emphasis from transformative institutional change to stability, a choice of self‐insurance via the Reserve Fund and Welfare Fund. There is indirect support for our argument in Schularick and Taylor's “Credit Booms Gone Bust” (2012), which shows a global trend toward safer policies, caused by the severity of the impact of crisis in a modern market economy.