In the Soviet Union, so the saying went, it was all about the plan! From 1929 to 1991 the USSR operated under the infamous command economy; Moscow gave orders and set plan targets and for a third of a century of Stalinist rule those targets were either fulfilled, falsified, or people vanished into the Gulag. Unsurprisingly, as a result of this morally and economically ruinous system, accurate economic information was nearly impossible to obtain.
This dilemma held true for local factory foremen and the upper echelons of the Soviet leadership alike, as the narratives of KGB agents learning their country's real gross national product from Western intelligence sources have repeatedly demonstrated. Fiscal transparency was hard to come by, to say the least.
Vladimir Putin's rise to power carries an opportunity to level the playing field, fight corruption and bring budgetary transparency. Russia needed a new mechanism to get to the bottom of its internal financial relations. The EastWest Institute's Moscow Centre conducted one of the most in-depth, comprehensive studies in the history of Russian finance. The Federal Budget and the Regions was produced by EWI in cooperation with a team from Russia's Ministry of Finance, the Central Bank and the Ministry of Federal Affairs and Nationalities. The report was grounded in the values of transparency and objectivity. Funded by the Russell Family Foundation and an anonymous family foundation in New York, The Federal Budget and the Regions analyzed the fiscal flows from Moscow to Russia's other 88 regions (excludes Chechnya where figures were not available) and vice versa. The study provided Russian economists and foreign investors, "a unique source of data for analysis and an inspiration... on the issue of Russia's center-region fiscal relations." The quality of the information gathered drew lofty praise from economists the world over.
A full-length book version was published in English in the fall of 2000 entitled The Fiscal Structure of the Russian Federation and a second, more in-depth volume that analyzes figures from a five-year period shortly followed.
Besides the influential fiscal transparency project, EWI has launched the Russian Regional Report, a weekly publication analyzing economic, political and business developments in Russia's 89 multi-ethnic and geographically diverse regions. In 1998, so as to secure the utmost quality of information and administrative analysis the Institute opened the EWI Moscow Centre. The Moscow Centre staff work to develop initiatives strengthening the management of the federal system, enhance the ability of the regions to influence federal policies, provide a neutral forum for Russians to explore Russian foreign policy and coordinate with leaders from the public and private sectors to develop new approaches to building a successful market economy.