HSE and Other Global Experts Discuss ‘Regional Heterogeneity and Incentives for Governance’
On May 29-31, 2014 the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development (ICSID, HSE) will hold an international conference on ‘Regional Heterogeneity and Incentives for Governance’ in Pushkin, St. Petersburg. The conference will begin with the EACES-HSE workshop ‘Political Economy of Development: A Comparative Perspective’. Among many topics, participants will discuss the long and short-term prospects for institutions, processes of institutionalization, investment climate, lending, and enterprise location in Russia.
The major goal of the conference is to bring together Russian and foreign experts in political economy and economic policy who have an interest in regional politics, bureaucracy, and property rights. This year, the following ICSID associates and partners will take part in the conference: Daniel Treisman (UCLA), William Pyle (Middlebury College), Thomas Remington (Emory University), Alexander Libman (Frankfurt School of Finance and Management), John Reuter (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Higher School of Economics), along with many others. The organizers have also invited leading experts on regional governance and development in China and Russia to participate in the event.
The researchers will focus largely, although not exclusively, on the Russian and Chinese experience in these areas. This topic is motivated by a rethinking of the substantive role of the state in developing economies. It is also driven by a reconsideration of the important role that regional heterogeneity and subnational economic and political processes play in the successful realization of national political development programmes.
This conference is the third annual event of its type organized by the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development. In May 2012, the conference was dedicated to ‘Institutions, Development, and Interest Groups’. Participants explored the process of modernization and institutional change in transition and developing countries through the prism of transition from limited access order to open access order, as proposed by Douglas North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast. In June 2013, the organizers brought together Russian and foreign experts in political economy to discuss new data and methods available to researchers who study institutions and economic development. In 2014, the researchers plan to continue their work on institutions and economic development, with a primary focus on the cases of Russia and China. The conference will be held at the HSE Management training centre – a multifunctional complex that includes a hotel, conference halls and smaller work rooms. The centre is situated in Pushkin, an historical town 40 minutes away from St. Petersburg’s city centre, with the famous Tzarskoe Selo 10 minutes away from the conference venue.
The International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development is one of the international laboratories established by the Higher School of Economics in 2011. Its current team includes researchers from Russia, the U.S. and Europe.