Problems and Prospects for the Development of New Commercial Structures in Russia and the Russian Far East

Abstract

The olcjective of this article is to discuss the problems and prospects for the development of new organizational forms and institutions in Russia as well as the Far East. The discussion begins with a cursory discussion of the legal and institutional background of the Soviet economic system before the beginning of Gorbachev's reforms. Next, the major property rights questions associated with the reforms are presented. The rest of the paper discusses and evaluates several of the key legislative reforms dealing with new property and organization forms which have been enacted in the Soviet Union and the Russian Federation since 1988. At the same time, the attributes and functioning of several new types of property and organizational forms are explored. These include joint ventures, foreign investment, free economic zones (FEZs), restructured state enterprises, various types of cooperatives, small enterprises,joint-stock companies, securities and stock exchanges, and commodities exchanges. The long standing and recent heating up of the territorial conflict over the southern Kurile Islands is briefly placed within the context of both the current internal economic and political turf battles raging in Russia. The reforun legislation dealing with the processes of destatization and privatization, including an early pessimistic assessment of the voucher scheme which iscurrently underway, is presented in the last section of the article. The author concludes with very little optimism that the Russian economic market reform process will be successful any time soon and with the fear that the disintegration of the old system is far from complete and has yet to yield its worst ramifications in terms of social infrastructure decay, widespread poverty, rapid concentration of wealth, armed regional and ethnic conflict, and widespread human misery and despair.