ABSTRACT
The modest development of advertising in 1990s has several causes. The main one is that the relatively low (compared to Western countries) purchasing capacity of the population made the promotion of goods ineffective. Second, as a totally new branch of economics and a new cultural form, advertising needed some time to be assimilated both by consumers and potential advertisers. Third, Russian legislation was quite unfavorable to the development of advertising. In particular, it regarded the major part of advertising expenses not as production expenses, but as made from taxable income (Interview 29; Dunkerley 2003). Also, newspapers in which advertising content exceeded 40 percent were taxed higher, although 40 percent is considered quite low even in richer Western countries: there commercial content averages 58 percent (Dunkerley 2003). These restrictions were not abolished until 2002.
