Forecasting the region’s household income and demand by the input-output model (Case study of the Republic of Bashkortostan)

Methods of interrelated forecasting of the regional outputs of individual branches, household income, and consumption are considered. The instrument for the analysis and prediction for the parameters of the region’s economic system is a closed input-output model based on endogenous indicators of household income and demand.     

State-of-the-art of Russia’s heat supply systems

The paper overviews the contemporary state of Russia’s heat supply systems and fuel consumption within its centralized part, the structure of heat consumption by economic sectors and types of industrial consumers. As shown, the centralized heat supply systems, providing the major part of country’s economy with low temperature heat, have heat losses and accident rate at a critical level. The state of decentralized heat supply systems of low rise buildings is not covered by national statistics at all. A second paper on the prospects and development of Russia’s heat supply systems will be published in a subsequent issue.     

What has been happening to income distribution and poverty in the homelands∗

Based on a synthetic sample of Black households and information about employment and incomes, a provisional account is given of the distribution of income between households and poverty in the homelands in 1960, 1970 and 1980. It is concluded that while the majority of households remained poor in 1980 (80 per cent below the urban minimum living level), households above the 30th percentile of the distribution in 1980 were considerably better off in real terms than households at the corresponding percentile in 1960. Below the 30th percentile, however, relative deterioration has taken place and below the 15th percentile absolute deterioration. The massive expansion of homeland population by incorporation of metropolitan townships, resettlement and other immigration, complicates the interpretation of these findings.     

Role of large companies in Russia’s oil and gas complex

The purpose of this article is to reconsider the interaction between major oil and gas companies and the state, which is especially important for modern Russia given its current conditions. General theoretical approaches are presented, as well as calculations of price and financial indicators reflecting the performance of these companies.     

Regional differentiation of coefficients of direct expenditures in input-output symmetric tables

The necessity to develop input-output regional tables on the basis of analysis of available regional technological coefficients and unit costs in physical and monetary terms is argued in this article.     

Transparenz im Journalismus

The transparency that journalists and newsrooms can produce for their audience has long been regarded as a rather marginal criterion for journalistic quality. But new transparency models??due to the interactivity, immediacy, archiving capacity and the absent limitation of space in the internet??offer greater potentials than classical instruments in print and broadcasting. In comments, web videos, blogs, twitter feeds and social networks, journalists discuss with users and publicly account for editorial decisions. Transparency is fashionable in the digital public sphere; its evaluation, however, is not clear, but ambiguous and complex. This paper conceptualizes (self-)transparency and qualitatively classifies the available instruments in a three-dimensional matrix model. This is to facilitate the analysis of problematic areas and potential conflicts: Newsrooms demonstrating open self-reflection dismiss the ideal of ??objective journalism??. Yet, transparency is not only an ethical demand, but is also supposed to strengthen trust in journalistic products because it permits quality evaluations by the audience. An experiment shows, for the first time, that self-transparency has an effect on trust in some aspects but not as a basic principle. Analysing this interdependency, we have to distinguish between transparency of process and of product as well as between different media.