ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how informed Jews might appraise the economic costs and benefits of emigrating from Russia. It also examines basic macroeconomic trends that are apt to shape Russian material welfare in the years ahead, and describes how various institutional reforms are likely to shape material aspects of Jewish life in the former RSFSR. This assumption obviously can be challenged, and of course it goes without saying that non-material factors may easily dominate economic concerns. Subject to these reservations it will be shown that Russian economic prospects for the remainder of the decade are bleak, but opportunities might be brighter for Jewish entrepreneurs and the Jewish community at large insofar as they are intertwined. This schizophrenic liberalization has predictably spawned 'catastroika', a situation in which destructively inconsistent reforms cause an economic implosion, a sudden and drastic contraction in gross national product.
