User:Lampthecat/sandbox

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Article Evaluation--Russian Privatization

The introduction of the piece is heavily opinionated, assuming that what came out of Russian privatization was bad. There also should be more information I believe on how heavily state owned natural gas and oil companies are in Russia, which also make up 30% of Russia's GDP and finances many other industries. There is not much on contemporary Russia under Putin, which would be important to look at because of the increasing state control under the regime. The section "first decade of 2000s" is poorly written and too short and only focuses on state regaining control of some assets. It also does not include how oil and gas companies were consolidated under Putin regime and were owned by friends of Putin. Another point that might be interesting in this article is that Russia was transitioning at a time when the dominant economic theory was neoliberalism, which heavily influenced the advisors. The article says that privatization brought corruption, but do not attempt to understand why it failed in Russia, but worked in similar contexts such as Poland. The first source I looked at, "The Necessity of Gangster Capitalism" seems to be reliable. Written by a Rutgers professor, she aims to understand Russia's privatization decline into corruption through a marxist lens of primitive accumulation, where Russia for the first time was accumulating capital to be a capitalist society. In order to prove her point, the author looks at privatization schemes and sites Jeffrey Sachs, one of the architects of Russia's economic transition in the 1990s. None of the sources seem to be newer that 2012, so while it is important to look at sources from the time (1990s), maybe more contemporary sources would provide an updated picture of the state of privatization. One of the sources, "Privatization with Government Control: Evidence from the Russian Oil Sector", is not properly cited or linked, but I was able to find the article through googling the title. An article was from Sputnik News, owned by a Russian broadcasting company, which might not be reliable because of the state's control over media.

The rating for this article is that it needs citation verification