Article
Бразилия на мировом рынке продовольствия
Nowadays, when the traditional factors of world leadership are becoming less important, the key role on the global market play that countries, who have managed to modernize its agricultural sector and to provide the favourable positions for its activity and development. In this context the experience of the leading countries of Larin America, and especialy of Brazil, is of interest. Brazil have managed to modernize its agriculture and to become one of the key exporters of the agricultural products to the world market. This article covers the factors, which have let Brazil to transform its outdated agricultural sector to one of the most competitive branch of its economy, Brazils export by type of the product and by geography of trade and also the week points of Brazilian agricultural policy.
This paper examines how export and export destination stimulates innovation by Russian manufacturing firms. The discussion is guided by the theoretical models for heterogeneous firms engaged in international trade which predict that, because more productive firms generate higher profit gains, they are able to afford high entry costs, and trade liberalization encourages the use of more progressive technologies and brings higher returns from R&D investments. We will test the theory using a panel of Russian manufacturing firms surveyed in 2004 and 2009, and use export entry and export destinations to identify the causal effects on various direct measures of technologies, skill and management innovations. We find evidence on exporters’ higher R&D financing, better management and technological upgrades. Exporters, most noticeably long-time and continuous exporters, are more active in monitoring their competitors, both domestically and internationally, and more frequently employ highly qualified managers. Exporters are more active in IT implementation. When it comes to export destination, we find that non-CIS exporters are more prone to learning. However, we cannot identify that government or foreign ownership shows any impact on learning-by-exporting effects.
In 1937, the Japanese economist Kaname Akamatsu discovered specific links between the rise and decline of the global peripheries. Akamatsu’s theory of development describes certain mechanisms whose working results in the narrowing of the gap between the level of development of the economy of developing and developed countries, and, thus, in the re-structuring of the relationships between the global core and the global periphery. Akamatsu developed his model on the basis of his analysis of the economic development of Japan before World War II, with a special emphasis on the development of the Japanese textile industry. Akamatsu’s catch-up development includes three phases: import of goods, organization of the production of previously imported products, and export of those goods. This model proved to be productive for analyzing the development of many other developing countries, especially in East Asia, making the theory of flying geese popular among the economists of these countries, as well as the whole world. The “flying geese” model produces certain swings that may be denoted as Akamatsu waves. Akamatsu waves may be defined as cycles (with a period ranging from 20 to 60 years) that are connected with convergence and divergence of core and periphery of the World System in a way that explains cyclical upward and downward swings (at global and national levels) in the movements of the periphery countries as they catch up with the richer ones.
This article studies the relationship between exporting and past productivity at the firm level. Panel data from two surveys of Russian manufacturing firms conducted in 2005 and 2009 are used. We analyse the difference between continuing and new exporters, and study how drivers to exporting differ if firms export to CIS or high-wage advanced countries. We find empirical evidence for the self-selection hypothesis: both continuing and new exporters are more productive and larger than non-exporters and export quitters. Path dependence in the nature of foreign trade ceased to exist: serving the markets of the former Soviet Union requires the same productivity advantage as exporting to the developed countries.
After Brazil's transition to democracy in 1985, a number of progressive actors, including a new political party - the Workers' Party - championed a raft of participatory reforms. Today, these reforms have garnered global attention for their effectiveness at combating inequality, encouraging active citizenship and reshaping state-civil society relations. However, no democratising project can entirely cast aside the existing state structures that pattern and give shape to political life. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, Victor Albert provides a critical analysis of citizen participation in Santo André, in the region of Greater São Paulo where the Workers' Party was founded, by exploring the challenges participants face as they take part in institutions pervaded by the administrative culture of the state.
The article is devoted to the analysis of trends in international trade development in Russia in the period following trade liberalization. Using statistical data analysis changes in scale and the structure of international trade since the first years of economic reforms in Russia are estimated.
This paper empirically investigates the effects of vertical export diversification on economic growth in Russian regions. First, we explore differences in vertical export diversification across Russian regions and analyze whether the relationship between intra-industry vertical export diversification and economic growth takes place at the regional level in 2003-2009. Using OLS and GMM estimators and controlling for a quality differences when calculating productivity level of export goods, we show that initial specializing in low-quality goods (with implied low- productivity level) leads to higher subsequent economic growth. The possible explanation is that, regions with low-quality goods in their export basket are able to improve productivity in relatively shorter terms (comparing with the situation of export discovery) and as the result grow faster. However, as it was shown, these effects of initial specialization in low-quality products on faster economic growth do matter only for regions, which are far from technology frontier.
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.