Crucial to that, they say, will be an upgrading of Russia's inefficient economic institutions -- its weak legal system, bloated state apparatus and sagging Soviet-era utilities.
However, the imperial metropolis can also have a relatively weak, limited, and decentralized government; an inefficient economic system; and multiple cultural identities.
But it is also inefficient in economic terms.
During the Cold War, U.S. strategy was to contain Soviet expansion until the Soviets' inefficient communist economic system collapsed from within.
Seventy Harvard students dramatized dissatisfaction with the economics profession when they walked out of Prof. Gregory Mankiw's introductory economics class on Nov. 2, protesting, in an open letter to their instructor, that the course "espouses a specific — and limited — view of economics that we believe perpetuates problematic and inefficient systems of economic inequality in our society today".
"The old game has started collapsing," says Xu Xiaonian, a professor of economics at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, referring to China's inefficient export-oriented economic model, which can be prone to overheat.
The Soviets were inefficient: relative to economic output, Russia uses up to four times as much electricity as west European countries.
Certainly, no one is claiming that, leaving farming to one side, Latin America is a world leader in productivity.Some of the reasons why manufacturing and services in Latin America are relatively inefficient are structural: economic activity is dominated by a mass of small and inefficient service businesses, and perhaps as much as half the population works in the informal economy.
PAGE 1 A DOWNSIDE OF SUBSIDIES Fuel subsidies offered by some countries don't just help raise costs for the rest of the world by artificially stimulating demand, Robert H. Frank writes, they are also an inefficient approach to economic incentives for the countries offering them.
But simply banning short-term rentals is both overbearing and, more important, inefficient: from an economic point of view, it makes little sense to allow apartments to sit empty when there are people willing and able to spend good money to stay in them for short periods of time.
The current centralised system of public finance is inefficient and stymies economic growth.
