Article
The concept of public goods, the state, and higher education finance: a view from the BRICs
Because higher education serves both public and private interests, the way it is conceived and “nanced is contested politically, appearing in different forms in different societies. What is public and private in education is a political…social construct, subject to various political forces, primarily interpreted through the prism of the state. Mediated through the state, this construct can change over time as the economic and social context of higher education changes. In this paper, we analyze through the stateђs “nancing of higher education how it changes as a public/private good and the forces that impinge on states to in”uence such changes. To illustrate our arguments, we discuss trends in higher education “nancing in the BRIC countries„Brazil, Russia, India, and China. We show that in addition to increased privatization of higher education “nancing, BRIC states are increasingly differentiating the “nancing of elite and non-elite institutions.
The paper develops an approach to analyze dynamics of economic network structures, such as spatial agglomerations. The approach is based on a use of powers of matrices with an idempotent operation.
We consider a network model of production with externalities which describes a situationtypical for many economic, social, and political systems. In the first period of time each of the agents in the network receives endowment and distributes it between consumption and investment. In the second period the agent’s consumption depends on its own investment as well as on investments of its neighbors. The agent’s benefit is determined by its consumption in the two periods. We introduce adjustment dynamics into this model and study the problem of stability of the game equilibrium. An important factwhich we have discovered in our research is the special role of the conditions of the presence and the absence of productivity both in a static and in a dynamic framework. The specifics of the dynamics and the nature of the resulting equilibrium depend on the parameters of the model and on the character of the initial disturbance. We have found the instability of the inner equilibrium and have studied the convergence to a new corner equilibrium and the stability of the latter. The instability of the inner equilibria, which we found and the sources of which we study, is the property typical for social and economic systems. The presence of many social institutions can be explained by the wish of the members of the society to preserve the existing equilibria under the dynamic instability which would take place without such stabilizing institutions.
We consider a dependence of the growth rate on the elasticity of factor substitution in a framework of a model of mutual dependence of n agents. This model is interpreted as a network structure and can be used to analyze agglomerations. The development is modeled as an increase in values of the agents in a dynamic system with CES functions. We investigate the cases of high and low complementarity of activities. In particular, we receive conditions allowing the identification of the cases when the elasticity of factor substitution has a positive effect on the growth rate under high complementarity of activities, and when the elasticity of factor substitution has a negative effect on the growth rate under low complementarity of activities.
Smoking is a problem, bringing signifi cant social and economic costs to Russiansociety. However, ratifi cation of the World health organization Framework conventionon tobacco control makes it possible to improve Russian legislation accordingto the international standards. So, I describe some measures that should be taken bythe Russian authorities in the nearest future, and I examine their effi ciency. By studyingthe international evidence I analyze the impact of the smoke-free areas, advertisementand sponsorship bans, tax increases, etc. on the prevalence of smoking, cigaretteconsumption and some other indicators. I also investigate the obstacles confrontingthe Russian authorities when they introduce new policy measures and the public attitudetowards these measures. I conclude that there is a number of easy-to-implementanti-smoking activities that need no fi nancial resources but only a political will.
One of the most important indicators of company's success is the increase of its value. The article investigates traditional methods of company's value assessment and the evidence that the application of these methods is incorrect in the new stage of economy. So it is necessary to create a new method of valuation based on the new main sources of company's success that is its intellectual capital.