A tale of two crises: Federal transfers and regional economies in Russia in 2009 and 2014–2015

We examine transfers from Russia’s federal government to the regions during the two recent economic crises. We show that while federal transfers in 2009 were large and targeted poorer regions, the 2014–2015 transfers were much smaller and not targeted. This policy shift was accompanied by a relatively greater decline in own revenues in the poorer regions and their worse economic performance overall. As a result, interregional budget expenditure inequality in Russia was significantly higher in 2014–2015 than it had been for years. This is important because regional budgets are responsible for a large share of investments, housing, education and healthcare.     

Potential Impact of Climate Change and Armed Conflict on Inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa

This study investigates the potential impact of climate change and armed conflict on inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The system-GMM for a panel of 35 SSA countries is employed using annual data from 1997 to 2018. The empirical results indicate that armed conflict and climate are major drivers of inequality in SSA. The direct impact of the two determinants is more than the indirect impact. Also, the impact of armed conflict is more than the climate change. The coefficients of population growth, output growth, unemployment, natural rent, exchange rate and inflation rate are significant positive predictors of inequality in the SSA. The study advocates for a multidisciplinary inclusive growth strategy that prioritises the climate change reversal, de-escalation of armed conflict, population control, reduction of the unemployment rate and increasing informal sector productivity, to promote inclusive growth and reduce inequality. However, sequencing the policy targets relative to the magnitude of their impact on inequality is extremely crucial.     

Informal employment in service industries: estimations from nationally representative Labour Force Survey data of Russian Federation

ABSTRACT

As the largest post-Soviet transition economy with substantial labour immigration and a considerable informal-sector Russia serves as an interesting case to study informal employment in the service and non-service economic sectors. The study fills the gap of the lack of empirical papers grounded on the reliable massive individual data. This article discusses almost twenty years’ dynamics of informal employment rates within the service and non-service industries based on the nationally representative Labour Force Survey primary data, collected quarterly for 2010–2015 with a sample size of about 200 thousand respondents per quarter. The unexpected finding is that the rate of informal employment is higher in non-service economic activities. Informal workers in the service sector in Russia are typically male, not very young, without tertiary education, living in urban areas. The paper also provides a comparative regression analysis on the probability of being informally employed in the service and non-service sectors.     

基于指挥信息系统的通信部队指挥应用分析

随着指挥信息系统在全军的广泛运用,指挥方式由传统的"树状"改变为"网状"、"扁平状"。然而现通信部队在开展指挥信息系统训练、应用上还存在一定的短板,在提高整个部队的指挥能力上无法提供高效支持,文章对通信部队的指挥信息系统在实际运用上进行了初步分析,并指出了目前存在的不足,对如何提高通信部队利用指挥信息系统提高整体作战能力提出了对策和建议,对提高指挥信息系统在实际中的应用具有积极意义。     

Urban Warfare Ecology: A Study of Water Supply in Basrah

This article assesses the impact of armed conflict on the drinking water service of Basrah from 1978 to 2013 through an ‘urban warfare ecology’ lens in order to draw out the implications for relief programming and relevance to urban studies. It interprets an extensive range of unpublished literature through a frame that incorporates the accumulation of direct and indirect impacts upon the hardware, consumables and people upon which urban services rely. The analysis attributes a step‐wise decline in service quality to the lack of water treatment chemicals, lack of spare parts, and, primarily, an extended ‘brain‐drain’ of qualified water service staff. The service is found to have been vulnerable to dependence upon foreign parts and people, ‘vicious cycles’ of impact, and the politics of aid and of reconstruction. It follows that practitioners and donors eschew ideas of relief–rehabilitation–development (RRD) for an appreciation of the needs particular to complex urban warfare biospheres, where armed conflict and sanctions permeate all aspects of service provision through altered biological and social processes. The urban warfare ecology lens is found to be a useful complement to ‘infrastructural warfare’ research, suggesting the study of protracted armed conflict upon all aspects of urban life be both deepened technically and broadened to other cases.     

System dynamics modelling and forecasting health tourism demand: the case of Russian resorts

This article presents the results of the system dynamics modelling of the regional market of health tourism in the Krasnodar region of Russia. The research was based on various indicators characterizing the supply and demand for this type of tourism for years 2006–2012. The medium-term forecast made by constructed model shows a possible decrease in number of health tourists and income of sanatorium organizations. Price competition of inexpensive foreign resorts was a key factor influencing the market of tourist services; therefore ruble devaluation to US dollar may improve the prognostic indicators.     

Structural change in China: the role of factor market distortions

This paper proposes a systematic accounting framework to decompose the reallocation of labour out of agriculture into factor market distortions and market-driven forces. The findings are twofold. First, the removal of factor market distortions is a dominant driving force of the structural change in China in the last decades, which contributes 50.52%, and market-driven forces account for the rest 49.48%. Second, the contribution of market-driven forces has been increasing with the deepening of market-oriented reforms, while the impact of the removal of factor market distortions has been decreasing especially along with the slowdown of labour market reforms after China joined the WTO in 2001. The results imply that further reforms that aim at correcting factor market distortions could still be an important impetus of structural change in the future.     

从资本运动角度看经济全球化

经济全球化已成为世界经济发展的一种趋势。其中。体现特殊社会生产关系性质的资本的运动起了关键性的推动作用，它贯穿了整个社会生产过程，其运动的结果必然是经济全球化。正在进行社会主义市场经济改革的中国，要积极应对经济全球化的现实，利用世界经济舞台，发展我国的生产力。     

The effect of banking crisis on bank-dependent borrowers

We provide causal evidence that adverse capital shocks to banks affect their borrowers’ performance negatively. We use an exogenous shock to the U.S. banking system during the Russian crisis of Fall 1998 to separate the effect of borrowers’ demand of credit from the supply of credit by the banks. Firms that primarily relied on banks for capital suffered larger valuation losses during this period and subsequently experienced a higher decline in their capital expenditure and profitability as compared to firms that had access to the public-debt market. Consistent with an adverse shock to the supply of credit, crisis-affected banks decreased the quantity of their lending and increased loan interest rates in the post-crisis period significantly more than the unaffected banks. Our results suggest that the global integration of the financial sector can contribute to the propagation of financial shocks from one economy to another through the banking channel.     

俄语中“约数”的表示法及其应用

俄语数词和汉语数词一样是表示数量和顺序的词,分基数词和序数词两种,基数词又有确切数和约数的区别.约数也是一类在我们日常生活中经常碰到的、广泛使用的数.本文就俄语约数的表示法进行了归纳和总结,并举例说明了约数的用法,以供同行参考.