View Research by Author - Raymond J. Struyk

Citation URL: http://www.urban.org/RaymondJStruyk

This practical text provides analytic tools and real world examples to equip both students and professionals with the skills they need to develop —and implement —effective public policies. Focusing on transition economies, Morse and Struyk concentrate on the day to day tasks involved in tackling social and economic policy issues. They thoroughly cover the practicalities of activities such as allocating resources, balancing political and technical factors, introducing competition into the public sector, weighing costs and benefits, monitoring and evaluating programs, and even presenting policy recommendations, as well as the specifics of the actual decisionmaking process. Exercises and case studies allow readers to apply lessons learned to real situations. Published by Lynne Rienner Publishers.

This paper presents an impact evaluation of an active labor market program operating in over a dozen Russian cities. The program provides job search assistance and significant financial and social services support to unemployed workers who are members of very poor families. It is of interest because of high success (job acquisition) rates previously documented. The analysis shows that participants are significantly more likely to find and retain a job than a control group of similar workers who registered at the local Employment Centers at the same time. On the other hand, these workers were found to take jobs paying significantly lower wages than the controls. Importantly, data for an earlier participant cohort (but no controls) show that 75 percent of program participants remained employed more than a year after exiting the program.

This work explores the satisfaction of a sample of 300 frail elderly from rural Russia with the support services provided by social service agency staff. The client population lives in extremely difficult conditions in terms of housing and associated communal services. They reported high levels of satisfaction with the agency provided services. The patterns identified are broadly consistent with expectations based on modeling done for the U.S. populations receiving at-home care. The results clearly indicate the value of providing such services to frail elderly in such circumstances.

This article describes UI's efforts to strengthen the policy development skills of Russian local government officials and NGO representatives. In 2-3 day courses, participants work together on exercises in analytical decision-making methods and monitoring and evaluation. The course also covers key concepts in policy making, such as considering the distributional aspects of policies, developing explicit decision-making criteria, balancing political and technical factors, defining public goods and services, and introducing competition to the public sector. Evaluations of the course indicate that it fills a definite training need for local officials and staff at advocacy NGOs in Russia.

During the transition period, the countries of Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States have witnessed the combination of sharp decentralization of government responsibilities to the local level, the creation of a flourishing nonprofit sector, and a growing need for NGOs to generate income beyond donor assistance to expand services. Russia is no exception. In this environment a strong case can be made for social service NGOs to be contracted by local governments to provide these services on behalf of city agencies. This arrangement provides a funding base for NGOs and introduces healthy competition into service delivery. This monograph describes and analyzes the early experience of several Russian local governments with contracting out. The main conclusion is that for this type of contracting out to be successful will require greater professionalism--of most NGOs in service delivery practices and local government agencies in contracting and in monitoring contractor performance. The author argues for a shift in some donor-supported training activities away from advocacy to service delivery NGOs.

When Russia's housing allowance program, the country's first means-tested program, was introduced in 1994, it was truly innovative. But there were difficulties from the start, many arising from the division of authority for setting program parameters among different levels of government. In 1996, the program's original simple basis for benefit determination was seriously impaired by the introduction of different principles for very low-income households. The analysis presented here documents the impact of these variations on participation rates in a sample of Russian cities. Large inequities are obviously present in the treatment of similar households from city to city.

During the past two winters, breakdowns in district heating services in Russia have grabbed international headlines. In Russia these services and water and sewerage services are the responsibility of municipal governments; these governments set the tariffs for these services. This article examines the tariff-setting process during 1997-2001 for these two services with particular emphasis on the decision process for considering tariff increases. We find that little progress has been made during the transition period in developing the legal base for rational tariff-setting procedures. Overall, tariff increases have been substantially less than the rate of inflation. Statistical analysis confirms that decisionmaking is highly politicized and that in times of extreme inflation tariff increases lag even further behind inflation. There is an obvious acute need for leadership at the national level to address these problems.

This paper reports the results of an assessment of the current practices of 13 Russian NGOs in delivering various types of social services. We find that the range of capability of Russian nonprofit organizations engaged in providing such services is indeed wide. We confirmed the relatively high level of professionalism in those NGOs that had received substantial technical and financial assistance from international organizations with similar missions. Additionally, among the nine "grass roots" NGOs in the sample, one-quarter appears to have the capacity to deliver services under contracts to local governments. A clear need for training in the process of service delivery was identified. An expansion in donor-supported training for the many NGOs engaged in these activities is recommended beyond the areas of start-up, governance, networking, and fund raising for which training is now abundant to ways to increase the efficiency and professionalism of service delivery. (The Nonprofit Review, Vol. 2., No. 2, 63-73 (2002))

This book provides sophisticated advice tailored to the specific needs of think tank leaders in eight critical management areas: motivating and retaining staff; maintaining quality control; Developing new products and services and identifying new business opportunities; creating strong team leaders; Working successfully with the Board of Trustees or Board of Directors; structuring the research staff; Communicating results effectively; and determining an accurate overhead rate.

This paper introduces the concept of mortgage default insurance as developed in the United States into the context of Russian mortgage lending. The first part of the paper discusses the broad principles and operations of mortgage default insurance offered by private companies as it works in the United States. The pricing of this product and the preconditions for offering such insurance are highlighted. The second section outlines the operation of the U.S. government-supported default insurance offered by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). The final part applies the foregoing information to the situation in Russia today and concludes that the conditions necessary for launching mortgage default insurance do not currently exist in the country. Nevertheless, there are a number of essential actions that can and should be taken over the next several months to put Russia on the road to establishing such insurance in a few years. The paper finishes with a possible action plan for the next two years.

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