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The Politics of Intergovernmental Transfers in Post-Soviet Russia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Daniel Treisman
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In Russia's lingering constitutional crisis, struggles over fiscal politics have taken on a broader institutional significance – at times even threatening to undermine the federal state. This article studies the evolving fiscal relationship between Moscow and the regional governments in the early post-Soviet period. To explain why some regions currently receive large net transfers (subsidies, grants, other benefits) from the centre while others pay large net taxes, net central transfers per capita have been regressed on a range of predictors reflecting social ‘need’, preferences of central politicians (electoral interests, pork barrel allocation, policy objectives) and lobbying capacity of regional governments. The most significant turn out to be three bargaining power variables that signal regional discontent and credible resolve to threaten economic and constitutional order – a low vote for President Yeltsin in the 1991 election, an early declaration of sovereignty and the incidence of strikes in the previous year.

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British Journal of Political Science , Volume 26 , Issue 3 , July 1996 , pp. 299 - 335
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

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21 By the autumn of 1992, about twenty regions had reportedly stopped full payment of taxes to the centre, and by 1993 the figure had reached about thirty (Wallich, , Russia and the Challenge of Fiscal Federalism, p. 248).Google Scholar

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34 The official figures, however, do not include various spending items such as government spending obligations that have not been met and interest rate subsidies on centralized credits. According to one report prepared by the Finance Ministry, when such expenditures are included the federal budget deficit for 1992 rises to 36.5 per cent of GDP (see ‘Russian Finances in 1993: A Finance Ministry Survey’, Voprosy Ekonomiki, 1 (1994), 3–86Google Scholar, and Hanson, Philip, ‘The Russian Budget Revisited’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Research Report, 3, 18 (6 05 1994), pp. 14–20.)Google Scholar

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37 Based on both Le Houerou, , DetsentralizatsionnyeGoogle Scholar, Annex 2, and Freinkman, and Titov, , ‘The Transformation of the Regional Fiscal System’.Google Scholar

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41 The Finance Ministry discontinued using expenditure norms in 1988, according to Martinez-Vazquez (see Martinez-Vazquez, Jorge, ‘Expenditures and Expenditure Assignment’, p. 111Google Scholar, in Wallich, , ed., Russia and the Challenge of Fiscal Federalism, pp. 96–128).Google Scholar However, oblast and rayon governments continue to use them to make a case for greater tax retention or transfers. In any case, the norms traditionally employed were only for recurrent – not capital – expenditures, and represented estimated operating costs of running existing facilities. They, thus, reinforced whatever pattern of distribution had resulted from past capital investment.

42 Wallich, , Russia and the Challenge of Fiscal Federalism, pp. 45–6.Google Scholar

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44 The cases used include only seventy-two of Russia's eighty-nine administrative regions. First, Chechnya and Ingushetia have been combined into one case, since some of the data were only available for the former Republic of Checheno-Ingushetia. Secondly, tax data were not available for an additional sixteen regions (these included all eleven autonomous oblasts and okrugs and five republics: Adygeia, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Udmurtia, Gorny Altai and Khakasia.) Nevertheless, the sixteen republics that remain make possible comparisons based on regions' administrative status.

45 Zimmerman (1992), cited in Wallich, (Russia and the Challenge of Fiscal Federalism, p. 222)Google Scholar, cautions that summing regional inflows and outflows may yield an oversimplified picture, as the multiplier effects for different flows will probably differ. Nevertheless, since data are not available to estimate such multipliers, as a first approximation the aggregated data should still be informative. The general results of the aggregated analyses are born out when inflows and outflows are disaggregated (see Section III and Appendix).

46 For the first nine months of 1992.

47 Freinkman, and Titov, , ‘The Transformation of the Regional Fiscal System’Google Scholar, Table 2.

48 The data were obtained from several sources. Those on tax payments and receipts of central transfers (other than budget investments) are based on figures published by Leonid Smirnyagin, an adviser to President Yeltsin on political geography and a member of the Presidential Council, in the newspaper Segodnya (Smirnyagin, , ‘Politichesky Federalizm’).Google Scholar According to Smirnyagin, the data on tax remittances by the regions in 1992 were taken from the President's Budget Message (Byudzhetnoe poslanie), which circulated in the spring of 1993. The statistics on receipts of central financial resources were prepared by the regional politics department of the Council of Ministers, using information from the Ministry of Finance. (Smirnyagin has said that these data were rechecked by the Ministry of Finance and corrected before he was allowed to present his findings to President Yeltsin.) The figures on central budget investments, and the data used in operationalizing the independent variables, were obtained from a variety of statistical handbooks, mostly published by the Russian Committee on Statistics (formerly Goskomstat). Questions may certainly be raised about the quality of the financial data. However, as long as no more reliable figures are available it seems worthwhile to conduct preliminary analysis of those which are obtainable. Results should, of course, be interpreted with some caution. As mentioned, I have wherever possible tested the results by running disaggregated regressions and using alternative data sets.

49 These were a subset, for which data were available, of the total 1.98 trillion roubles in direct credits estimated by Freinkman, and Titov, , ‘The Transformation of the Regional Fiscal System’.Google Scholar

50 One additional caveat concerns the unit of analysis: as some Russian geographers have noted, differences between urban and rural areas within the same region are often much greater than differences between regions in Russia (see Alexei Krindach and Turovsky, R. F., ‘Vozmozhnost “Kommunisticheskoi Restavratsii” v Rossii: Rekonkista v Regionakh ili Rekonkista Regionov’ (Moscow: mimeo, 1993).Google Scholar

51 Rich, , ‘Distributive Politics and the Allocation of Federal Grants’.Google Scholar

52 Stein, , ‘The Allocation of Federal Aid Monies’.Google Scholar

53 The terms were combined in an index to economize on degrees of freedom. For a similar approach to index construction, see Putnam, Robert, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).Google Scholar

54 For instance, Gottschalk, , ‘Regional Allocation of Federal Funds’, p. 190.Google Scholar

55 One should note, however, that the outline of the future electoral system – majoritarian or proportional representation – was not at all clear during 1992. Concentrating on marginal constituencies only has a clear rationale in flrst-past-the-post systems.

56 These were: (a) the Commission on the Ethnic and Federal System and Inter-Ethnic Relations and the Commission on the Socioeconomic Development of the Republics, Autonomous Oblasts and Okrugs, and Ethnic Minority Groups of the Council of Nationalities; (b) the Commission on Budgets, Planning, Taxes and Prices of the Council of the Republic; and (c) among joint committees of the Supreme Soviet, the Committee on Inter-Republican Relations, Regional Politics, and Co-operation, the Committee on Legislation, and the Committee on Self-Government of Local Councils of People's Deputies.

57 Todres, Vladimir, ‘Primore probastovalo den’, Segodnya (13 08 1993), p. 3.Google Scholar

58 For the cities of Moscow and St Petersburg, the value of the private farms variable was set at the mean value for all the other cases, since the cities have no rural population or private farms.

59 This was a discontinuous variable, based on the classification provided in Yasin, Yevgeny, Regioni Rossii v Perekhodny Period (Moscow: Expert Institute of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, 1993), p. 24.Google Scholar This study divided Russia's regions into three groups on the basis of the degree of price regulation in the period March 1992–June 1993: those with active price regulation (more than nine of nineteen food products surveyed subject to price controls); those with a ‘mixed strategy’ (three to eight of the nineteen products subject to price controls); and those with little or no price regulation (controls on two or fewer of the nineteen products). For much of the period, the price of bread remained regulated at the federal level.

60 They were combined in an index to economize on degrees of freedom. Including discontinuous variables, such as that measuring the extent of price regulation, in a factor analysis is often viewed as problematic. However, when the correlations between the underlying variables are believed to be moderate (no greater than 0.6 or 0.7), the technique can still be expected to perform well (see Kim, Jae-On and Mueller, Charles W., Factor Analysis: Statistical Methods and Practical Issues (Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage Publications, 1978), p. 75.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar Given the generally moderate observed correlations between different measures of commitment to economic reform, it is likely that this condition is met in this case.

61 See, for instance, Bahl, Roy, ‘Revenues and Revenue Assignment: Intergovernmental Fiscal Relations in the Russian Federation’Google Scholar, in Wallich, , Russia and the Challenge of Fiscal Federalism, pp. 129–80Google Scholar; Tong, James, ‘Fiscal Decentralization and its Effects on China, 1980–1994’ (Los Angeles: UCLA, unpublished paper, 1994).Google Scholar

62 Bahl, , ‘Revenues and Revenue Assignment’, pp. 177–9.Google Scholar This index, which ranges in value from 0.49 to 2.53, is calculated by dividing the actual tax collected by the region in the first quarter of 1992 by an estimate of the region's taxable capacity. The data used are for sixty-seven of Russia's regions.

63 For one example, see an interview with the finance minister, Boris Fyodorov, in mid-1993 (Bekker, Aleksandr, ‘Boris Fyodorov: “The Next Two Weeks Will be a Time of Political Choice”’, Segodnya (24 08 1993), p. 11Google Scholar, translated in Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, 34 (1993), 11–13.)Google Scholar Fyodorov accuses the agrarian lobby of pressing for credits and subsidies with ‘hysterical speeches’ and ‘picket lines of people with pitchforks’.

64 This was based on projected oil production figures for 1993 reported by the Russian ministry of fuels and energy (McLure, Charles E. Jr, ‘The Sharing of Taxes on Natural Resources and the Future of the Russian Federation’Google Scholar, in Wallich, , Russia and the Challenge of Fiscal Federalism, p. 190.)Google Scholar

65 See, for example, Bekker, Aleksandr, ‘Premer obeshchaet regionam lgoti u derzhit slovo’, Segodnya (19 10 1993), p. 3.Google Scholar

66 I also tried replacing this variable with separate dummies for visits by the president, vicepresident, prime minister and speaker of parliament. None of these was significant.

67 The listings were from two sources – Russian Government Today (Fall 1993 edn) and Panorama Publishing's Rossiskaya Federatsia: Telefonnaya Kniga (07 1993).Google Scholar The two listings corresponded in all but one case.

68 According to Jon Elster, bargaining power is the capacity ‘to harm the other party without conferring excessive harm on oneself.’ See Elster, Jon, Local Justice: How Institutions Allocate Scarce Goods and Necessary Burdens (New York: Russel Sage, 1992), p. 175.Google Scholar

69 For those regions for which the number of man-days lost was zero or too low to be included in the published statistics, I coded the log strike variable as 0. This assumes that below a certain threshold level (1,000 man-days) the number of man-days lost to strikes does not affect allocation of transfers or tax breaks. A log formulation was used since it seemed reasonable to expect that man-days lost to strikes would have a, perhaps quite sharply, diminishing impact on central transfers: the first 10,000 man-days lost should earn a region far more benefits than the third 10,000 man-days.

70 Most of these are listed in Sheehy, Ann, ‘Fact Sheet on Declarations of Sovereignty’, Report on the USSR (Munich: Radio Liberty, 9 11 1990), pp. 23–5Google Scholar. Of these, twenty-one were republics or autonomous formations, while one, Irkutsk, was an ordinary oblast. Some of the republics and autonomous formations did not declare sovereignty in 1990.

71 Correlation coefficients between them are available from the author upon request.

72 I tried substituting: (a) the margin of victory for the Yeltsin vote in the 1991 presidential election, (b) a republic status dummy for the sovereignty declaration dummy, (c) a dummy recording a region's having a deputy on any of a broader selection of parliamentary committees for the dummy recording a deputy on the budget committee, (d) the number of deputies the region had per capita in the Supreme Soviet for the number of deputies it had per capita in the Congress of People's Deputies. The latter two variables were at first retained, since they were more significant than those they replaced (though still not significant at p = 0.05). However, F tests suggested that they did not add significantly to the fit of the regression, so they were excluded. This was also true for the urbanization, tax effort, oil sector, agricultural employment, pace of economic reform, official visits, and Moscow permanent representative variables. I also tried including the non-Russian and titular nationality variables (see below).

73 A non-log formulation of the strike variable is even more significant if one extreme outlier, Kemerovo, is excluded from the data. In 1991, the coal-mining region of Kemerovo lost about eight times more man-days to strikes than the next most strike-prone region. Not surprisingly, it did not receive eight times more in net transfers.

74 Of course, correlation does not prove causation. Some other factor – boldness of bargaining style, for instance – may have made those regions that were more likely to declare sovereignty also more effective intergovernmental bargainers.

75 When the variable measuring Yeltsin's margin of victory was substituted for the pro-Yeltsin vote, it was less significant (coefficient of −0.17, significant at p = 0.10) and the regression had a lower adjusted R2. There was no discernible policy – either by supporters or opponents of Yeltsin – of concentrating resources on marginal constituencies.

76 One alternative view might nevertheless explain such allocative policy as a means by which Yeltsin repaid his supporters; in 1990–91, Yeltsin in fact encouraged both strikes and autonomy movements within Russia as a way of putting pressure on President Gorbachev and the Union level of power. (I am grateful to Linda Cook for reminding me of this point.) This would suggest a likely shift in the determinants of policy in 1993, a hypothesis to test as data become available. Such explanations would not, however, account for the greater allocations to regions that voted against Yeltsin.

77 To test this, I ran separate regressions of (a) per capita regional tax remittances to the centre and (b) per capita total transfers to the regions, on the right-hand variables of the equation in its final form. In the tax regression, per capita profits were by far the most significant predictor (coefficient of 7.61, significant at p = 0.0000): more profitable regions paid more tax per capita. In the transfers regression, though not significant, per capita profits had a positive coefficient. This seems to reflect larger flows of credits to the more profitable, industrialized regions (see the disaggregated regressions in the Appendix, Table A2.

78 I also tried including the elements of the index separately. While none were separately significant, all but one had a positive coefficient, suggesting greater net transfers went to those regions with lower needs. The exception was the variable for provision of hospital beds, which was in any case highly insignificant (at p = 0.68).

79 Another hypothesis might posit the existence of a non-linear relationship between need and intergovernmental transfers. The centre might provide benefits for opposite purposes – to reward the successful and to assist the underprivileged regions – creating a curvilinear relationship. To explore for such relationships, I examined scatter-plots of net transfers against each of the independent variables. There was no sign of a curvilinear relationship in the case of social need, or any of the other variables.

80 Nor did the urban population variable become significant when the agricultural employment variable, with which it was correlated (at r = −0.56), was excluded.

81 Also, when the elements of the index were included separately, none were significant.

82 Nor did the agricultural employment variable become significant when the regression was run with the urban population variable excluded.

83 Bahry, , Outside Moscow.Google Scholar

84 Bahry, , Outside Moscow, p. 159Google Scholar; her quotation is from Gustafson, Thane, Reform in Soviet Politics: The Lessons of Recent Policies on Land and Water (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

85 For a recent discussion of this literature, see Stein, Robert M. and Bickers, Kenneth N., ‘Universalism and the Electoral Connection: A Test and Some Doubts’, Political Research Quarterly, 47 (1994), 295–317CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Weingast, Barry R., ‘Reflections on Distributive Politics and Universalism’, Political Research Quarterly, 47 (1994), 319–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

86 This might still be true if central politicians were more likely to visit regions which in general received low net transfers. I also tried replacing the visits variable with separate dummies for visits by each of the four politicians. None of these was significant, though visits by the parliamentary speaker were almost significantly negatively related to net transfers. The most plausible explanation is that, as conflict grew between Khasbulatov and Yeltsin during 1992, the speaker was more likely to visit the relatively deprived and discontented regions where anti-Yeltsin sentiments were growing.

87 For an article which argues the need for a disaggregated approach, see Rich, , ‘Distributive Politics and the Allocation of Federal Grants’.Google Scholar

88 This seemed more informative than the region's per capita tax remittance to the centre, since the latter would obviously be proportional to the region's tax base. The proportion retained by the regional government is a more revealing indicator of bargaining success or central priorities.

89 Smirnyagin, , ‘O prave natsii’.Google Scholar

90 Kennedy, Paul, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 217.Google Scholar

91 Stone, Norman, Europe Transformed: 1878–1919 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 316.Google Scholar

92 Smirnov, Viktor and Kotelnikova, Elena, ‘Oblastnoi sovet khochet stat' verkhovnym’, Kommersant-Daily, 125 (6 07 1993).Google Scholar

93 Petrovsky, Viktor, ‘Prizyv k zdravomysliyu’, Rossiskaya Gazeta (8 07 1993), p. 2.Google Scholar

94 See Pashkov, Aleksandr, ‘Byudzhetnaya voina rossiiskikh territorii nachalas. Yest pervie zhertvy’, Izvestia, 121 (1 07 1993), p. 1.Google Scholar

95 Ilyumzhinov, Kirsan, Letter to Deputy Chairman of the Russian Government, Boris Fyodorov (10 05 1993).Google Scholar

96 Todres, , ‘Primore probastovalo den’.Google Scholar

97 Vetrov, Ivan, ‘Vlasti i profsoyuzy Dalnego Vostoka vystupili vmeste’, Kommersant-Daily (12 08 1993), p. 3.Google Scholar

98 Bekker, , ‘Boris Fyodorov’.Google Scholar

99 The constitutional standoff was (at least temporarily) resolved in the aftermath of the October 1993 storming of the parliament building in Moscow. Voters in the December 12 elections approved a new draft constitution in which rights of republics and regions are formally equal. However, the practical politics of intergovernmental relations are anything but settled.

100 For a preliminary report, see Treisman, Daniel, ‘Intergovernmental Transfers, Political Opinion, and State-Building in Post-Communist Russia’ (Harvard: unpublished paper, 1994).Google Scholar

101 Ordinary least squares in the first stage of this procedure will give consistent estimates, even though the dependent variable is dichotomous.