Economic Freedom or Government Regulation: Analysis of Russian People Attitudes (Center for Institutional Studies Research Seminar)

Speaker: Maxim V. Bryukhanov (C.Sc. in Economics, Junior Research Fellow at the Center for Institutional Studies, NRU HSE)
Co-author:  Sergiy Polyachenko (M.Sc. in Economics, Junior Research Fellow at the Center for Institutional Studies,  NRU HSE)

May 21, Thursday, Myasnitskaya 24, building 3, room 424, 17.30. 

Success of market reforms is mainly defined by people’s attitudes toward economic freedom and Adam Smith’s basic principles of laissez-faire. Government generates supply of freedoms and population generates demand for them. As the result, we observe level of economic freedom in equilibrium.
(Shiller et al., 1990) provided evidences that the start of market reforms in Russia was highly supported by population. Moreover, there were no significant differences in market preferences between Russians and Americans of those times. However, there has been change in Russian public opinion on economic freedom over the years. According to the study “Twenty years of reform through the eyes of Russians”, the share of respondents who support governments with centralized regulation is rising over time (Twenty, 2011). In addition, there is also increase in the share of respondents who are unhappy with private property, who demand government provision of transportation and healthcare services and who beware of free international relationships. There are also evidences that Russians prefer economic and political stability.
In this study, based on 22nd wave of RLMS-HSE collected in the year of 2013 we show distribution of Russian people’s opinion concerning the necessity of government price regulation, protectionism, free immigration and its economic consequences. We choose a set of attitudes toward economic freedom predictors which are commonly used in the literature. Employing those predictors, we perform analysis of means and regression analysis of attitudes toward economic freedoms.

Key words: attitude toward government regulation of prices, attitude toward protectionism, attitude toward freedom of immigration, subjective estimate of economic consequence of immigration, RLMS.