Проектирование реформ: как искать промежуточные институты (Proektirovanie reform: kak iskat' promezhutochnye instituty)[Reform Design: How to Search for Interim Institutions]

It is a typical case in the practice of reforms, when a reformer, who seeks to introduce an institution with desired properties, discovers that its immediate implementation is impossible because of resource, technological, cultural, political or institutional constraints. In this case, one has to construct a sequence of alternating interim institutions that, for each moment of time, satisfy the existing constraints, and, in the end, provide the implementation of the desired institution. The paper describes some methods and constructions that can be used to create sequences of interim institutions. Two approaches to their design are considered: the method of "mixing" and the method of institutional competition. I explore the possibilities of finding interim institutions through institutional experimentation and by means of using a theory of the evolving institutions in more developed countries. The suggested methodologies are used to analyze a number of reforms, such as privatization in China and Slovenia, the mass introduction of funded pension systems in the 1990s, changes of the voting rules in the Council of Ministers of the EU, the introduction of the unified state examination for admission to Russian universities, etc.