Article
Экономическая теория ценности блага как интегратор трудовой теории стоимости и теории трудовой предельной полезности
This draft is translated from English, with notes and commentaries. D. Ricardo's manuscript "Absolute value and exchange value" was written in the last months of his life (aug.-sept. 1823). In it, he continues to search for "an invariable measure of value" and comes to a series of nontrivial ideas that have become (as shown in the translator's notes) starting points for creating a model of the circular flow economy within P. Sraffa's "production of commodities by means of commodities". Ricardo's manuscript can be viewed as a concentrated expression of his final ideas regarding the so-called labor theory of value.
The collection of articles on the economy on theoretical topics, including on the history of economic science and methodology, is published.
In the preface to the translation of the last manuscript by D. Ricardo, "Absolute value and exchange value" (August-September 1823), an assessment of the historical and economic significance of this text in the corpus of Ricardo's works is given, a variant of rethinking Ricardo's heritage in Russia (the tradition of N. Zieber, on the one hand, and V.K. Dmitriev, on the other). The content of this essay is unveiled, as applied to the analysis of P. Sraffa's "Production of Commodities by means of Commodities".
This chapter takes us to another case of institutional and field turmoil: high Stalinism after World War II. The Blockade of Leningrad had claimed more than one million victims and disrupted the work of economists, especially those at Leningrad State University. Adjusting to post-war life was its own challenge, but by 1948, the Leningrad Affair heralded a new wave of Stalinist repression aimed at Leningrad elites who led the city through the wartime Blockade. Part of this dynamic took place in public “discussions” as a tool to discipline economists and professors to make sure their “science” did not challenge the authority of elite or ideology. The threat to power, it seemed, was local-level fields: a profession grounded in the search for Truth and intimately linked to Marxism-Leninism, an institution (the university), and “science” as practice and identity that was supposed to transcend social reality. High Stalinism was not only a matter of a suspicious elite rooting out competition; it had a complex dynamic that ran through combinations of institutions that, in this case, came together in the university.
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.