25. Oktober 2017 - IAMO and the All-Russian Institute for Agrarian Problems and Informatics (VIAPI) will organize a workshop entitled “Agricultural Policies in Russia: Insights from Economics and Political Economy”. This event will take place on 25 October 2017 at the Moscow State University, Russia.

Agriculture is one of strategic sectors that remains heavily subsidized in many countries. Russia has set course on self-sufficiency and has allocated substantial budgetary resources for agriculture support. However, the effectiveness and efficiency of this support is a matter of debate. Similarly, distribution of these resources across the federation appears to be uneven in terms of both the amount and the instruments chosen. Federal jurisdictions possess substantial autonomy allowing them to set their own goals and priorities. Traditional economic theories provide limited explanatory power to differences in policy priorities across regional units of one federal country or economic union of states. Political economy approaches have been successful explaining policy outcomes in the contexts of other industries. Agricultural sector has profited from these developments only to a limited extent.

The aspiration of this workshop is to bridge the gap between agricultural economics and political economy in an effort to explain how agricultural policies emerge and what their potential effects might be. The aim is to bring leading scholars with various backgrounds in order to intensively discuss possible explanations of the differences in agricultural policies from economics and political economy prisms. The workshop shall mainly provide a platform for researchers to share their work on how institutional and intergovernmental setup, political processes and fiscal factors may affect policy outcomes in agriculture and other industries. In addition, the participants will have a chance to discuss the effects of agricultural policies on the sector and rural areas. The format of this event will allow for more in-depth discussions going beyond typical international conference settings.