Structual or institutional change?

The paper attempts measuring institutional change as compared to structural change. I take the case of the Russian banking industry in 1991–2016. I put forward a set of metrics featuring the actors broken down by ownership form (stateowned vs. private banks) and the resources that each bank category commands. Another set of metrics features the regime and modality of banking according to certain norms. These latter are quantified via the performance of key banking functions with regard to the rest of the economy, the relevance of banking for the economy and its contribution to social welfare. At the first stage, the communist-era credit system falls apart, and so do coordination mechanisms between monetary and real sectors of the economy. After the 1998 crisis, evolution goes in the direction of greater government involvement in banks and centralized allocation of financial resources. Banks become more committed to their core business of financing the real economy. The performance of state-owned banks improves whereas that of privately owned banks deteriorates. Structural change has not yet led to a substantially different way of functioning of the banking industry, according to pattern recognition methodology. A state-owned bank acts mainly under the guidance of its management rather than the government, and pursues profitability. The contribution of this paper is that it tackles the interplay between structural and institutional change and tries to quantify both of them in a particular economic sector.