The dynamics of socioeconomic reform in Russia: Medico-demographic indices

A medico-demographic periodization of Russian socioeconomic reforms is presented, according to which the state of public health is characterized by different vectors.     

Toward the assessment of the Russian population mortality risk factors and the feasibility of their reduction: Comments on the World Bank Report “Dying Too Young”

A comparative study of external mortality risk factors according to World Bank experts (Dying Too Young Report, 2005) and findings of other projects, as well as mortality reduction programs, is presented. The World Bank experts overrate the significance of smoking and lead pollution as mortality factors and underrate that of alcohol, air pollution, and unfavorable occupational environments. In addition, the impacts of radon, climate warming, and low temperatures, which are very important negative factors for Russia, are overlooked in the Report. Although mortality reduction measures are very topical under the current demographic crisis, certain federal target programs envisage very general measures, and the death rate remains high. Road Safety Improvement, which is the most concrete among these programs, may indeed help reduce road accident-related mortality. The importance of air pollution as a risk factor may grow as a result of changes in the structure of the fuel balance and an increased share of coal combustion.     

Recent Trends in the Skill Composition of Legal U.S. Immigrants

We examine fluctuations in the predicted educational attainment of newly arrived legal U.S. immigrants between 1972 and 1999 by combining data from the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service with the Current Population Survey. A mid-1980s decline gave way to a noticeable improvement in the skill base of the immigrant population between 1987 and 1993. A short decline in the quality of immigrant skills—less severe than that of the mid-1980s—took place in the mid-1990s. In 1998, the trend reverses once more: The labor market quality of new legal U.S. immigrants improves. The primary sources of the fluctuations include changes in the quality and quantity of immigrants obtaining an adjustment and variations in the distribution of source regions and entry class types among new legal U.S. immigrants.     

A theory of system-transcending integration

The integration of national economies of a different level of development and an opposite quality of system will have a more profound influence in shaping the world of tomorrow. Therefore a theory of economic integration must be formulated which transcends the existing systems, i.e. a theory of co-integration.     

The Soviet Union’s attitude

The Soviet Union will not be represented at the North-South Summit in Cancún, even though both the developing countries and the Western industrialised countries would have liked to see it participate in the talks on solving the problem of underdevelopment. What are the USSR’s reasons for its negative attitude? Are there any prospects of involving the Soviet Union and its CMEA partners in joint development cooperation?     

ALTERNATIVE PRODUCTION FRONTIER METHODOLOGIES AND DAIRY FARM EFFICIENCY

This paper estimates technical efficiency (TE) measures using four alternative production frontier models, and evaluates the sensitivity of the results to the choice of methodology. The Cobb-Douglas functional form along with data for 1982 and 1983 from 404 dairy farms located throughout six northeastern states in the US are used in the estimation. A general conclusion is that, broadly speaking, frontier function models are neutrally upwardly scaled versions of the OLS or average model. A second conclusion is that different models yield markedly different efficiency levels across firms. However, the correlation between the indexes from the various methods is high, which implies that the ordinal ranking of firms according to their measured level of technical efficiency appears to be independent of the method used for a given year. By comparison, the correlation between efficiency indexes for the same method across time, although positive, is much lower than the previous set of correlations. Correlation analysis of efficiency versus farm size and of efficiency versus returns over variable costs, based on the alternative models, yielded consistent results.