Poverty effects of Russia's WTO accession: Modeling “real” households with endogenous productivity effects

Abstract

We employ a computable general equilibrium model of the Russian economy to assess the impact of accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on income distribution and the poor. We incorporate all 55,098 households from the Russian Household Budget Survey as agents in the model. The model includes FDI in services and Dixit–Stiglitz endogenous productivity effects in imperfectly competitive goods and services sectors, features which are crucial to the results. We show that incorporating the diversity of households though a real household model is important for assessing household impacts, but getting the key model features right is equally important.