Article
Human capital in post-transition Russia: Some critical remarks
The year 2020 marks the 30th anniversary for the post-soviet transition of Russia, and the post-soviet transformations have been spectacular. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s led to a rapid depreciation of human capital at state-owned enterprises and caused a major crisis throughout the manufacturing and services industries. Market reforms took place that were premised on the idea that they should become fruitful ground for further socioeconomic development, and in particular, for the transition to a new information age represented by a fully-fledged knowledge economy. The economic growth of the early 2000s was expected to facilitate this transition. Are there any achievements now to celebrate?
This paper analyzes the role of education in economic growth with special focus on countries with high participation in tertiary education. The practical challenge that this conceptual paper is trying to address is that global economic growth is decreasing in the last decades – especially in developed countries.
It is for the first time when the phenomenon of the political class is being investigated in the Russian political science literature. In this edition, the political class is viewed as a community of persons professionally involved in the sphere of politics. Political elites, administrative and political bureaucracy, deputy corps, party functionaries, analyst center staff, expert community, political consultants, political journalists are regarded as important segments of the political class. The study of political participation of corporate business is also paid attention to. An important advantage is the combination of theoretical, methodological and applied aspects of the research, as well as a comparative perspective: the features of the formation of a political class in Ukraine and other countries of Central and Eastern Europe are considered.
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The article is devoted to the analysis of the relationship between individual’s power status and economic status, his/her belonging to a professional group and educational level. The study describes a method of construction of a scale to measure the power status of the working population in modern Russia and provides the results of its implementation. The study reveals that the power status of most of Russians has zero value; and despite the fact that in modern Russian society representatives of the first occupational group according to the ISCO08 classification (leaders) have the highest scores on the power status scale, representatives of other occupational groups also possess this status. Besides, the power status determines individual’s economic position, and this relationship is dependent on individual’s professional skills and can be different across different occupational groups. The empirical basis of the study is the data of the 24th of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) conducted in late 2015.
The article discusses different approaches to the “human capital” interpretation. The interconnection between “human capital” and “career” is specified. Profound analyses and interpretation of empiric material is proposed. Taking into account the interpretation there is a conclusion that studying in specialized classes and a “knowledge aspect” of the human capital with high school students aren’t directly connected: both students of the non-major and specialized classes don’t really think seriously about building their career in future. The human capital being figured out through the USE credits doesn’t depend on a students’ aspiration to build either vertical or a horizontal career.
The purpose of this paper is to focus on one of the major emerging Asian economies – India – to examine the role of human capital in asset prices.
The present paper is aimed at considering the evolution of human capital theory. Drawing on the wide range of classical and recent studies, the author shows the link between changes in economies of industrially developed countries and the development of the human capital theory revealed in the expanded list of indicators measuring human capital. The author proposes a periodization of the human capital theory suggesting 5 phases: (1) the pre-industrial phase (up to the seventeenth century); (2) the phase of mass education (the nineteenth through the rst half of the twentieth century); (3) the late industrial period (1960s–1970s, the period when the core of the human capital theory was established); (4) the post-industrial period I (1980s–2000s); and (5) the post-industrial stage II or contemporary period (2000s–2010s). The study reassesses narrow interpretations, which still widely exist among applied economists. Based on the findings of the human development studies, the author argues for a broader list of indicators of human capital, and, specifically, considers human capital through the lens of national development; moreover, this coincides with the core of the given theory. It is shown that the traditional interpretation of human capital, known as years of schooling and training, does not represent the current situation in the economy, and can be extremely harmful to society if it is adopted as the basis of public policy oriented to the formation and growth of society. The present study can be useful to both economists and sociologists focusing on the indicators of human capital and its contribution to the socioeconomic development of a modern society.
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