Home – Home – Jornals – Region: Economics and Sociology 2010 number 2

The paper analyses the methodological issues of building regional monitoring systems (to monitor regional situations and problems) as well as the best practices of such informational and monitoring systems. The paper also considers the approaches appropriate to formimg a socio-economic block of the Monitoring System of the Socio-Economic and Environmental Situation Center for the Siberian Federal District

The author describes the world monetary system, the causes of the crisis in this sphere, political measures to manage the crisis, and methods to increase market demand. The paper analyses the approaches to forming an international currency such as a regionalization method and dominant currency one.

In the author's opinion, the origin of the economic recession taking place in most countries resides in the house price crashes happened in the USA's and UK's housing markets. The financial crisis has been caused by many factors, which are analysed here. Some ways of how to manage the crisis are presented too.

The author considers the world crisis as the natural consequence of the structure of the world financial system, and concludes that the prime cause of the crisis resides not in the lack of financial management but in its low quality as well as in principal impossibility to assess properly any cover on risk. The structure of the world currency system and global disbalances, as the author sees, are interdependent.

The paper analyses the German financial crisis and priorities of the crisis responses undertaken by German government; assesses how effective the anti-recessionary measures undertaken by both central and lands' governments are, and shows the economy management improvements made in Germany in the post-crisis time.

The paper analyses the impact of institutions of federalism on the economic development in the crisis, and the effectiveness of anti-recessionary programs. We put forward the hypothesis that federations proved to be less sensitive to the negative impacts of a crisis. The fact that in Russia, the crisis had much more negative impacts than in other countries, could be explained by the nature of Russian institutional system and, especially, by deterioration of Russian institutions of federalism.

The paper analyses the innovation processes in Russia, and how the crisis affects them. We conclude that our policy responses to the crisis should imply the governmental support for factors of the innovation processes, which could be considered as one of the ways in practice to control and mitigate the crisis.

The paper presents the results of the comparative analysis of the socio-economic situation in Russian federal districts, and calculations of a long-term forecast. The author gives his opinion about the ways of how to improve the forecasting quantitative variables concerning development of the national economy and different regions in order to make such variables more reliable.

The paper analyses how the individuals' deposits influences the resources of Russian banks. We show that the depositors panic in the crisis has a serious effect on stability of both bank and national bank system. We show the tendencies how the volume and structure of individuals' deposits change; how to avoid the rash of withdrawals by individual depositors; and how the resources of Russian banks shrank because of such withdrawals happened in the period of the crisis. We also present our assessment of how the resources of Russian banks reduced because of the rash of withdrawals in the crisis

Further involvement of Kazakhstan in world oil-and-gas markets is based on a steady growth of production and significant potential of these resources in the Republic. However, their export is limited by capacities of existing major pipelines. The paper proposes the variants of pipeline routes providing better export conditions; and assesses the economic effectiveness and consequences of these variants.

The paper analyses how the economic behavior, expectations, social attitudes and consumer preferences of the American people changed over the period of the crisis. We show that there is no age group which could avoid the stroke of the crisis, but the configuration and scope of problems affected the people as well as their reaction did depend on their age. High competition between the age and gender groups is still observed on labour markets; moreover, the crisis intensified it. Economic difficulties have a strong impact on the American peoples' life expectations and solidarity. Nevertheless, the firm belief that people's diligence and energy may ensure their moving forward in spite of any unfavorable economic conditions remains among the American people, and makes them feel mobilized for action.

Most experts explain a drastic change in Russian housing policy, implying a higher role of government bodies, by the world financial crisis. This change took place first and foremost, as we prove here, due to the fact that the buying power of groups with unmet housing needs had exhausted. The crisis just precipitated and intensified the transition to a new housing model by the government, which we consider - in the context of the theory of a planned distributive economy - as a natural phenomenon. The paper also describes some anti-recessionary housing programs as well as the key problems which the housing and utilities infrastructure faces.

The public health is considered as an important qualitative characteristic of the population and its resource as well as an integral indicator of communities' welfare. The paper analyses the key factors of morbidity, mortality and risks affected the population of different demographic groups in the Siberian Federal District. To measure such risks, we developed the indicators, and estimated their values, which we consider normal and advisable to be reached if we want to neutralize or mitigate any negative impacts on public health.

The paper considers the existing management models, i.e. what management tasks are set up, what instruments are used to perform analytical works, and how to assess whether results the of analytical works comply with development goals of the real economy. Key instrument of our study is a general equilibrium model which defines the output levels, employment, incomes, and prices. We suggest the Kantorovich-Koopmans's duality principle to be used to find the solution of optimal use of limited production resources.

The Informational System for Monitoring of National Socio-Economic Indicators operating in the Kazakhstan Republic is the first stage in building the Situational Center under the Ministry of Economy and Budget Planning of Kazakhstan. This System serves as a tool to assess operational parameters of the national economy and to predict future ones; to identify the sectors which are in critical state; and to make proper operational decisions via feedback regime

In the period of crisis, there was observed a short slowdown in implementation of the production and infrastructure projects by Russian oil-and-gas production complex. We show that there was no notable drop in investments made into the oil-and-gas production and transport while a critical reduction in financing the geologic explorations happened. The world oil and gas prices decreased in relation to their peak values, but remain at the level exceeding the values of the last decades, and show tendency to grow.

The paper analyses a large-scale institutional project of the Russian Federation - a structural reform in the railway sector. We describe the specifics of the methodology applied to the assessment of efficiency of the project characterized by high risks and dependant on multi-aspects externalities. We also show negative and positive results of the reform, what failures are observed and why they happened; and make recommendations on how, at least, to mitigate the consequences of such failures, if we will fail to eliminate them completely.

The paper shows that, because of negative impacts of the crisis and the reform taking place in the electrical energy industry, there is a necessity to transform the governmental policy concerning the management in this industry. One of the ways to such transformation, as we suppose, is to provide governmental support for building the small and autonomous enterprises producing electric power. First and foremost, the transformation should be done at the regional levels.

In 2009 the crisis considerably limited the number of new enterprises being built, and increased the number of those become bankrupt. The paper analyses the present state of industrial enterprises, and tendencies of their development. We also show what managerial changes happened in the context of the crisis.

In China provinces, the small and medium enterprises are predominant among all enterprises. Using the data of sociological and statistical researches, we analyze the problems which the small and medium enterprises faced during the world crisis. We show what anti-recessionary arrangements were undertaken by the central government, and how effective they were.

The paper describes the socio-economic situation in Russian regions over 2000-2007 - the period of the crisis-free development - through our analyses of such indicators as the comparative indicators of regional growth, transformation of the territorial structure, basic indicators of regional development, comparative consolidated indices of the situation in the units of the Russian Federation, and lists of regions-leaders and regions-outsiders.