Investment and Innovation State Support of Agriculture in Russia as a Condition of WTO

Russian agriculture is one of the industries operating in the unstable economic situation in a developing market taking into account risks of the world economy, economic, political, and climatic factors. The role of agriculture is to provide people＇s needs for food, significant effects on employment, the efficiency of domestic production, and way of life in rural areas by obligatory preserving food security in Russia. One of the major tasks for agriculture is the development of innovations and investments aimed at improving the competitiveness of the domestic agricultural sector. Russia＇s membership in the WTO since 2012 is getting a particular importance in the innovation and investment support of agriculture. The strategy of innovative development of the Russian Federation until 2020 ＂Innovative Russia--2020＂ assumes three possible options for innovative development： inertial （directed on imports）, catch-up development and a local technological competitiveness and a variant of achieving leadership in leading scientific and technical sectors, and fundamental research. A positive point is that the strategy provides an algorithm of state support of the innovation cycle. The innovation cycle is the process associated with the sequence of innovation transformations （scientific or business ideas） in products, technology, business process and launches it on the market for commercial use. A positively developing regional aspect is of great importance.     

An empirical model of the Brazilian country risk -- an extension of the beta country risk model

The paper examines the distribution of unemployment experience in Britain within the framework of the Han and Hausman semi-parametric estimator, which has the advantage of circumventing problems associated with individual heterogeneity arising from unobserved individual characteristics. The results imply that the unemployment burden is unequally distributed among the working population. Males and females bear an unequal unemployment burden. The study casts light on the characteristics of those individuals who are most likely to experience a high unemployment burden.     

A review of bank performance during transition in central Europe

This study, based on panel data from 189 industrial enterprises in 1992‐96, shows that privatisation 'on average' produces little improvement in performance of Russian enterprises. However, disaggregating the process, we reveal that methods of privatisation do influence performance but the impact is not always positive. The state seems to be a passive shareholder. At the same time, our results suggest that majority state ownership is preferable to a state minority stockholding, possibly because the absence of a monitoring shareholder in the latter case does not permit managers to achieve their own objectives at the expense of other shareholders.     

Informality and mobility

Informality is a defining characteristic of labour markets in developing and transition countries. This paper analyzes patterns of mobility across different forms of formal and informal employment in Russia. Using the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey household panel we estimate a dynamic multinomial logit model with individual heterogeneity and correct for the initial conditions problem. Simulations show that structural state dependence is weak and that transition rates from informal to formal employment are not lower than from non-employment. These results lend support to the integrated view of the labour market.     

Contracts,incentives and organizations: Hart and Holmström Nobel Laureates

This article reviews the contribution of Hart and Holmström, the 2016 Nobel Laureates in economics. Holmström's work on the principal-agent problem answered questions as to what should (and should not) be included in an incentive contract. His work helped explain the simple structure of incentive contracts we typically observe in the real world. The models he developed have been used to address questions of CEO compensation, organizational design and optimal regulation. A key element of Hart's research focused on the question of what are the optimal boundaries of a firm (and indeed, what a firm actually is). In doing so he developed the incomplete-contracts framework, which has subsequently been used to explain many economic phenomena whenever renegotiation is important, including authority and decision-making structures in firms, why financial contracts look the way they do, and various questions in international trade and public policy.     

On the Sensitivity of Premiums and Reserves to Changes in Valuation Elements

Upon differentiating the Thiele differential equations and the equivalence condition with respect to some parameter appearing in the equations, one obtains differential equations for the derivatives of the state-wise reserves and the premium level with respect to the parameter. The solution to these equations measures the impact on premiums and reserves of a change in the parameter. Typically only numerical results can be obtained, but the method applies quite generally to multi-state policies and to virtually any parameter, and so represents a panacea in (the vast majority of) situations where analytical results are out of reach. Extensions to higher order derivatives and higher order conditional moments are straightforward. A difference method for computation is devised, and numerical results are reported for some practical cases.     

Can Russia Resettle the Far East?

Russian scholars, politicians and media have been alarmed by the declining population of the Far East, seeing it as a step towards eventual takeover of the region by China. This article shows that the progressive depopulation of the Far East is a reality and will continue in the coming decades. In addition to natural decline, the Far Eastern population will shrink faster than that of Russia because of net outmigration. Economic stagnation will keep migration from the South of the region at its present low rates. Recovery will increase mobility and allow the present deferred migrants to leave for European Russia. In the unlikely event that the Far East outperforms the rest of the country economically, it will attract migrants. However, any inflow is likely to be small because of the shrinking populations in European Russia and other ex-Soviet republics, and the competition for migrants from other parts of the world.     

Age-specific dynamic labor demand and human capital investment

To study the optimal age-specific labor demand and human capital investment at the firm level we extend the standard dynamic labor demand model by introducing ‘age’ as a second dynamic variable and distinguish between two types of workers: ‘low skilled’ and ‘high skilled’. Applying an age-structured optimal control model we derive qualitative features of the optimal age-specific hiring and training effort. For the case of a linear revenue and production function we prove that firms do not anticipate changes in adjustment costs in their optimal decisions. This result no longer holds if a nonlinear revenue or production function is considered.     

Measuring potential gains from reallocation of resources

In this work we consider the case when efficient operation of individual economic units does not necessarily imply efficiency for a group of these units. Merging theoretical findings of Li and Ng (Int Adv Econ Res, 1995, 1, 377.) and Färe and Zelenyuk (Eur J Oper Res, 2003, 146, 615), we develop new group-wise efficiency indexes that measure the extent to which the performance of a group of economic units can be enhanced, even if all these units are individually efficient. The existence of such potential improvement is attributed to non-optimal allocation of inputs across the individual economic units from the point of view of a group of these units.