Home – Home – Jornals – ECO journal (ECOnomics and industrial Engineering) 2018 number 8

In the article necessity of state policy correction in relation to the cities in Russia towardsdecentralization and differentiation is stated. The mechanisms that allow to increase autonomy of the large cities and urban agglomerations are offered along with the corresponding calculations and expert estimates. Also attention is paid to the problems of absence at the state level of urban agglomeration concept and imperfection of state statistics concerning cities.

The paper considers the key factors and conditions which define concentration of the population and economic activity observed in major cities and agglomerations of the Russian Federation, and it shows that the Russian budgetary regulatory environment and policy play an important role in the advancing development of large cities along with well-known factors such as market volumes, a higher quality of labor, scale effects, higher innovative activity due to competition, and etc. To analyze the expenses of the RF budget system made in a city, the authors carried out a case study for a city budget of Novosibirsk and it shows that the expenses of the city budget make no greater than 1/3 of total expenses of the Rf budgetary system made in the city. The analysis of the Novosibirsk budget allows revealing key tendencies in dynamics of the budgetary indicators. The paper analyzes the structure of the city budget to show whether the city budget is well provided with its own revenues and how it depends on the transfers from the regional budget. The authors also consider the possibilities of how to use the budgetary resources to find major directions of expenditures made in territories of the city.

Twenty years ago Koltsovo was a typical single-industry town, and depended almost entirely on the activities of the State Center of Virology «Vector». Today it has a diversified economic base, and in terms of investment, trade, output, public expenditure per capita exceeds not only other cities, but also many industrialized regions of the Russian Federation. How such aMetamorphosis could have occurred? Why the settlement of Koltsovo doesn’t strive to obtain the status of the city? How it competes for labour force with nearby Novosibirsk and Akademgorodok? The mayor of Naukograd Koltsovo N.G.Krasnikov addresses those and many other issues.

The change of the shares of the main socio-economic groups of the population adversely affects the economic development of the country. The purpose of the article is to investigate these changes in the conditions of the demographic wave. To do this the official statistics and the demographic forecast until 2050 are used. Figures show that the number and share of the working-age population will decrease, those of the elderly will increase, and those of children may both decline and increase. This will lead to a reduction in the number of employee and further increase of employment of the elderly, a very large demographic burden, a decline in living standards and a decline in the domestic market volume.

The basic elements of working out the project referring the scientific and technological forecast of the Russian Federation development till 2030 have been considered in the article.The lack of project authors’ critical thinking towards the modern theories of the global economy is shown to cause misunderstanding the long- term Russia’s interests as well as the peculiarities of the challenges which the country faces nowadays that results in methodologically disputable basis of the forecast. The conclusion that targeting to the achievements of economic (tactical) aims in the scientific and technological activity leads to reducing the significance of the project as the mechanism of strategy planning has been proven. It is pointed out that stricterimplementation of the system approach principles in the analysis of the scientific and technological peculiarities in the branches of the national economy taken as the united complex could be the essential facility of increasing the project quality.

Cryptocurrencies as well as distributed ledgers called «blockchains» attract a great attention during the last years, and specialists from various professional spheres arise different questions concerning this theme. At the same time, there is a pool of questions, which do not have satisfying answers in spite of their frequent mentioning. In this paper, we present some reasoning connected with some of the most popular questions of that kind. In particular, we touch such problems as launching a national cryptocurrency and exploiting the blockchain technology in business sphere and governmental activities. We also analyze a commonly heard opinion that cryptocurrencies are, in fact, no more than the Ponzi scheme. Further, we briefly sketch the Bitcoin blockchain configuration and its stability if hypothetical quantum computer would be created.

According to the Bank of Russia (BR), Russia has been a large net creditor to the rest of the world over the last two decades. However, the rest of the world’s net debt to Russia has hardly increased in these years. This paradox is explained in the paper: net lending amounts in Russia’s official balance of payments (BoP) were largely ephemeral, and some provisions of the Russian BoP methodology were contentious. The issues related to Russia’s low foreign investment returns are also reviewed. Special attention is given to the statistical discrepancy in the Bank of Russia and Eurostat data on the direct investment flows between Russia and the EU. With the latest statistics according to the directional principle, it is demonstrated that the Bank of Russia compared with Eurostat greatly overstates the amount of the Russian foreign direct investments (FDI) in the EU and understates the scale of the Russian illegal capital flight. It is concluded that part of the funds appearing in the BR statistics as Russia’s FDI to the EU is regarded by Eurostat as irreversible capital flight from Russia. The extent of the Russian FDI round-tripping “out of Russia - to EU special purpose entities - back in Russia” is assessed.

This article is devoted to the analysis of using internal funds, bank crediting, issue of concessionary bonds for financing PPP projects in Russia. It is shown, that nowadays private financing of PPP projects deals with a systemic crisis in Russia, which is characterized both by the lack of long money and financial stability of private partners and also imperfection of the legal framework. Moreover, there is a problem with inefficient regulation of non-credit institutions investments and a lack of mechanism to attract investments into PPP projects. In this regard for the further development of PPP projects the effective measures, concerning the legislation for attraction of private investments into different PPP projects and economic actions to encourage the increase of long money in economy are required.

The article looks at the economic structure of the operational functions of an educational institution with a purpose of selecting the optimal approach to regulation and reforms in the higher education industry. The author believes that the course and program content as well as test material are natural monopolies, which implies an active government regulation. Academic administration is an oligopoly and needs only minimal monitoring from the state. Teaching itself is a monopolistically competitive market and, therefore, can be left to the market forces to achieve the optimal social outcome without any interference from the government side. The suggested approach allows simultaneously solving the problems associated with the quality of higher education and problems associated with public funding of this sector.

The paper analyzes the scale of the Siberian coals export and indicates their importing countries in the west and east (relative to the Siberia). The history of the coal export outside Siberia is outlined. The author examines the coal basins in Siberia, which coals are or can be exported. He also identified volume and areas for export from each Siberian coal basin. The development of the Russian facilities for the Siberian coal transporting is analyzed. The problems and constraints of the Siberian coals export, connected primarily with the railways and the cargo ports are investigated, as well as the possibility of overcoming them such like the reconstruction of old and construction of new railway branches, an alternative way of transporting the coal products, and the depth increasing of their processing. The outlook for the Siberian coals export is briefly presented.

The paper presents the results of the Russian labor market research in the field of personnel management. Author examined the composition and structure of this sector, identified the pain points, which the state, business, employees need to pay close attention. He compared data from different sources on the current representation of HR- specialists on the domestic market, studied the unfilled vacancies in the organizations requests, as well as obtainable information on the quality of high education on the profile of personnel management. Based of that analysis it can be concluded that the above part of labor market is characterized by significant discrepancies in indicators, in turn the educational market is overheated and does not reflect the real needs of the economy.Considering this situation, author make some recommendations on the possible directions of development of the labor market by the profession of personnel management.

The article contains reflections on the outcome of the 2018 World Cup. Against the backdrop of the excitement for the World Cup, everyday tasks of social and economic development have receded into the background. However, the time will come for summing up the results of the Mundial, the price of bread and circuses, and the image of Russia after mass euphoria.