Even if we ignore the consequences of Russia’s intervention into Ukraine’s internal affairs, Ukraine confronts some seemingly insurmountable problems in transitioning to a stable and prosperous state. Having inherited a top down and largely corrupt political structure, there are those who see decentralization in some form as a partial solution. Here, though, we argue that decentralization, even if crafted on the European Union template of subsidiarity, can introduce problems of collective action that would further undermine the country’s viability. To avoid exacerbating the problems of collective action occasioned by Ukraine’s fractured political economic system, decentralization must proceed with an understanding of how those problems are treated in successful federal states

How does the redistribution of income that a regime prescribes for society and the amount of public-good social-overhead investment it provides depend on the nature of that regime? And how do these influence said society’s productive success? Connections among these phenomena informed much of Mancur Olson’s (1982, 1991) life-work now so foundational to the literature on redistributive politics, economic growth/prosperity, and the nature of regimes. Still a transparent simple account of how the nature of a regime determines trade-offs between transfers and public capital investment can improve the foundations and clarify anomalies present in the literature. Here we elaborate a model to address these questions and we prove, contrary to received wisdom, that redistribution can reduce or actually and unexpectedly increase supplies of public overhead capital. Redistributive taxation reduces capital productivity, which incentivizes governments to supply less. But, contrary to conventional wisdom, redistribution can also so deplete the tax base that to offset some of the loss government will actually invest more in the way of public-overhead factor inputs than would a less redistributive regime of an otherwise comparable society.

Non-cooperative games such as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Stag Hunt, Asymmetric Coordination and others are primary tools used for modeling collective action. I consider formal models that are close cousins of such standard games: Schelling’s games, Kuran’s dominos and partition function form games. For certain empirical problems, each of these formalisms may have advantages over standard games. Among the benefi ts there are mathematical simplicity, more intuitive depiction of represented phenomena, and better operationalizability. I formalize all three models and prove simple existence theorems for two of them. The detailed examples of applications include vaccination, unpredictability of revolutions, and electoral coalitions.

The paper first highlights Olson’s contribution to social sciences. Two main dimensions of political regimes are then distinguished. Features of economically successful reforms are defi ned. Next, the situational determinants of market reforms are discussed. Against this background a special case is analyzed: reforms after socialism. Finally, the deterioration of economic systems and their causes are presented.