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.
Students' internet usage attracts the attention of many researchers in different countries. Differences in internet penetration in diverse countries lead us to ask about the interaction of medium and culture in this process. In this paper we present an analysis based on a sample of 825 students from 18 Russian universities and discuss findings on particularities of students' ICT usage. On the background of the findings of the study, based on data collected in 2008-2009 year during a project "A сross-cultural study of the new learning culture formation in Germany and Russia", we discuss the problem of plagiarism in Russia, the availability of ICT features in Russian universities and an evaluation of the attractiveness of different categories of ICT usage and gender specifics in the use of ICT.
The paper examines the structure, governance, and balance sheets of state-controlled banks in Russia, which accounted for over 55 percent of the total assets in the country's banking system in early 2012. The author offers a credible estimate of the size of the country's state banking sector by including banks that are indirectly owned by public organizations. Contrary to some predictions based on the theoretical literature on economic transition, he explains the relatively high profitability and efficiency of Russian state-controlled banks by pointing to their competitive position in such functions as acquisition and disposal of assets on behalf of the government. Also suggested in the paper is a different way of looking at market concentration in Russia (by consolidating the market shares of core state-controlled banks), which produces a picture of a more concentrated market than officially reported. Lastly, one of the author's interesting conclusions is that China provides a better benchmark than the formerly centrally planned economies of Central and Eastern Europe by which to assess the viability of state ownership of banks in Russia and to evaluate the country's banking sector.
The paper examines the principles for the supervision of financial conglomerates proposed by BCBS in the consultative document published in December 2011. Moreover, the article proposes a number of suggestions worked out by the authors within the HSE research team.