Although economics is taught to almost every college student in Russia, Russia badly needs more economists, but economics education programs currently are unable to adequately train these professionals. The overall quality of higher-level economics instruction remains poor. The key to improving the quality is to retrain current economics faculty.

Four years after the removal of Marxist-Leninist theory as the principal component of economics curricula, the quality of teaching of higher-level economics in Russia is still not up to the requirements. Most lecturers had no formal training in market economics and have had little opportunity for systematic retraining in programs supported by the West. Only a few lecturers are competent in teaching market economics, even at the introductory level. Most lecturers are in the midst of a professional transition, retooling by reading translated Western textbooks—some can be found reading the appropriate chapters before the class bell rings.

During our survey—conducted in the last quarter of 1996 in four Russian cities, Perm, Rostov-on-Don, Vologda, and Cherepovets, as part of the project "Teaching Economics in Russia" by the Global Development and Environment Institute at Tufts University—we often heard comments like "microeconomics is only about practical matters and not qualified as general theory by our Russian tradition" and "macroeconomics is just about a set of abstract and mystic hypotheses." The lack of understanding of market economics has negative consequences: undergraduate courses in economics are relatively few, and their quality is poor.

The shortage of qualified lecturers to train roughly 3 million students within a relatively short period is a daunting task by any measure. A few hundred Russians (many are not lecturers) are earning masters degrees in economics in programs run by Westerners in Russia, or at American or European universities. A lesser number are earning Ph.D. degrees. These programs will undoubtedly produce qualified economists, but training one Ph.D. will cost well over $100,000 and take at least five years. Moreover, training people in Western degree programs can be a risky investment because of "brain drain" and retention problems. Given that Russian university salaries are at the bottom of the income ladder, few people with a Western degree and good knowledge of English will choose to teach—if they return home at all.

Under such circumstances retraining the current economics faculty is a far more viable option for quickly improving the skills of economics lecturers. Retraining:

• Should be intensive (at a minimum it should be at the level of a three-credit course at an American university).

• Should be held on site where the trainees are, not concentrated in central cities. Most current economics lecturers under the age of 50 are women, and for cultural and economic reasons women in Russia today bear most of the family responsibilities. It is thus very difficult for them to be away from home for an extended period. This was a major reason given by survey respondents for not being willing to attend a retraining program.

• Should be able to generate a critical mass for change. A locally held program will make possible the training of a large number of lecturers in a given institution. These lecturers can then form a critical mass for initiating and sustaining changes in their respective institutions. This is particularly important because the content of every course must be approved by the department head and the academic dean, who may be resistant to change.

Has retraining mattered so far? Perm was chosen as a target city for a retraining program financed by the European Union’s TACIS. Two-thirds of the thirty lecturers sampled from the three institutions in Perm have attended some kind of retraining program, whereas only two of a total of twenty-nine lecturers sampled in the three other survey cities (Rostov-on-Don, Vologda and Cherepovets) attended retraining.

According to the survey, a lecturer in Perm teaches on average 2.22 and 2.26 hours per week in introductory micro- and macroeconomics, respectively, versus 1.09 and 2.09 hours per week for a lecturer in the other cities.

The study materials of the old political economy are dogmatic, inherently unsuited to open discussion and debate, and do not lend themselves easily to numerical application in the real economy. Partly for these reasons mechanical methods of teaching were common. Survey results show that in the surveyed cities other than Perm 96 percent of the lecturers rely on the traditional oral exam as the only way of testing for finals, while in Perm 30 percent of the lecturers also use other means to supplement the oral exam.

To conclude, the only viable and practical way to improve, on a large scale, the teaching of higher-level economics in Russia over the next decade, is to retrain the current economics faculty. The retraining conducted so far, although infrequent and insufficient, has made a difference. We have found strong support for the hypothesis that the most effective retraining should be intensive, locally held, and able to generate a critical mass for change.