Article
Russia’s Accession to the WTO. The Debate in the Russian Mass Media
The paper focuses on the debates about Russia’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) that unfolded in Russia’s print media from December 2010 to December 2013. The authors highlight the initial arguments of supporters and opponents of this accession, the ways in which those arguments are presented in the media, and the differences in the standpoints of the business, government and expert communities. The authors further analyze changes in the content of this discussion and its discursive space following Russia’s accession to the WTO. Our research on print media shows that positive assessments of Russia’s accession to the WTO prevailed before it entered into force. However, after the accession negative assessments started to dominate. This may be explained by the fact that before the accession it was mainly politicians and officials who expressed support for the act, while after the accession the negative views of the business community became more prevalent. Politicians and officials supported the accession by relying on abstract values of “progress” and “open markets”, while businessmen’s (mainly agribusiness) views took into account the non-competitiveness of their industries. Media campaigns helped some industries to create images of “victims” (resulting from enforcement of the treaty) in order to legitimize the industry lobby and the need for government subsidies to compensate for the damage caused by the WTO.
Souvent considéré comme une activité des plus nuisibles, le piratage des contenus audiovisuels n’en constitue pas moins, depuis des décennies, pour de nombreuses populations aux quatre coins du monde, un moyen majeur d’accéder aux produits des industries culturelles. Nourri d’enquêtes de terrain, cet ouvrage explore les enjeux que recèle ce phénomène complexe. Cette étude inédite analyse les stratégies globales de lutte contre le piratage, évalue les politiques des autorités nationales, décrit les usages que font les publics des contenus audiovisuels piratés, retrace les chemins qu’empruntent ces derniers et s’intéresse à ceux qui font le commerce de ces produits, de même qu’aux mutations engendrées par internet en la matière.
Yearbook World of Media has been being published since 2009. It represents an annual review of original researches in the field of media and journalism studies conducted by Russian authors from diverse cities and institutions.World of Media is aimed at promoting the development of Russian media and journalism studies in both national and global contexts, and stimulating a wider public interest in the journalism theories, methods, findings and applications generated by research in communication and allied fields. Yearbook World of Media is affiliated with National Association of Mass Media Researchers (NAMMI).
World of Media is published in the English language.
L’objectif de ce chapitre est d’expliquer le phénomène du piratage audiovisuel en Russie. Nous essayerons d’identifier les logiques qui le régissent dans le contexte de l’économie informelle et ses fonctions culturelles. Pendant les années 1990, les spécificités de la société russe – et, par conséquence, également, celles de son système médiatique – étaient expliquées par son caractère « en transition ». Ce genre d’approche sous-entendait que le processus s’achèverait par la mise en place de l’économie marchande, de la société civile et de la démocratie. Une bonne partie des chercheurs en communication, y compris certains chercheurs russes, ont ainsi cru pouvoir déceler l’installation, en Russie, d’un véritable marché des médias, connecté au marché global. Selon la même logique, les chercheurs en économie appréhen-daient le secteur informel voire semi-légal, y compris le piratage, comme un phéno-mène anormal ayant pour vocation de disparaître avec le développement de l’économie marchande. Dans ce sens, le piratage a souvent été représenté de façon univoque comme un moyen de rendre accessibles les produits culturels à une population n’ayant pas les moyens de les acquérir autrement. Nous allons ici essayer de démon-trer la nature mystificatrice d’une telle représentation et mettre en lumière les autres facteurs, en particulier culturels, qui expliquent le phénomène, ainsi que les rapports de force qui existent en son sein et les mutations qu’il connaît aujourd’hui.
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 results of cross-cultural research of implicit theories of innovativeness among students and teachers, representatives of three ethnocultural groups: Russians, the people of the North Caucasus (Chechens and Ingushs) and Tuvinians (N=804) are presented. Intergroup differences in implicit theories of innovativeness are revealed: the ‘individual’ theories of innovativeness prevail among Russians and among the students, the ‘social’ theories of innovativeness are more expressed among respondents from the North Caucasus, Tuva and among the teachers. Using the structural equations modeling the universal model of values impact on implicit theories of innovativeness and attitudes towards innovations is constructed. Values of the Openness to changes and individual theories of innovativeness promote the positive relation to innovations. Results of research have shown that implicit theories of innovativeness differ in different cultures, and values make different impact on the attitudes towards innovations and innovative experience in different cultures.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.