D uring the 1990s, Russia underwent extraordinary transformations. It changed from a communist dictatorship into a multiparty democracy in which officials are chosen in regular elections. Its centrally planned economy was reshaped into a capitalist order based on markets and private property. Its army withdrew peacefully from eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics, allowing the latter t...

Introduction In his seminal work Effectiveness and Efficiency, Archie Cochrane asked why, despite their enormous potential, randomized trials were much less widely used that they should be. At the time that he was writing, their geographical distribution was very uneven. He wrote ‘If some such index as the number of RCTs per 1,000 doctors per year for all the countries of the world were worked ...