Clifford Gaddy, an economist at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., made the radical claim that all of Russia’s reforms of the early 1990s had failed to budge the behemoths of the command economy, which continued, in all their illogical and profoundly unprofitable ways, to dominate the Russian economy. All the trappings of the new economy—the supposed market-based prices, the competitive salaries, and the taxes—were, according to Gaddy, nothing but illusions. He called it the “virtual economy,” coining the term long before the word “virtual” took on a different and more appealing
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