La campagne russe face à l'accession du pays à l'OMC : analyse institutionnelle[The Russian countryside facing the country's accession to the WTO: institutional analysis]

Russian agrarian reform failure is a direct result of ignoring the nature of agrarian institutions inherited from Soviet times and the application of a liberal neo-classical approach in the law making process. The most important problem which presents impediments to agrarian reform is the role of collective farms as the mechanisms of survival for rural communities. Agrarian reform legislation provided rural dwellers with a very powerful tool for the resistance to any institutional change. The authors of land reform legislation estimated that the most important thing is the right of owners of land and asset shares to buy and sell them. According to them, the inclusion of this right into legislation is sufficient to start a process of creation of viable agricultural enterprises on the land of former collective and state farms, with the subsequent concentration of land and other assets in the hands of the most efficient farmers. The reformers did not pay any attention to the institution of subsistence household farms. The research presented in this paper is made in the framework of the pragmatic institutional economics. The first two sections of this paper are devoted to methodology and techniques of institutional analysis.