Article
Социокультурные аспекты приграничной коммуникации населения России и Белоруссии в контексте нового этапа постсоветской интеграции
This project focuses on the main aspects of Russia-Belarus social communications having to do with the immediately-neighboring zones: the zones of trans-border municipal districts. It focuses on social-cultural communications because it is not possible to touch on all aspects of the communication process in one article, therefore this project places the accent on one of these aspects. In particular, the author draws the conclusion that over the past few years, an effect of spatial compression of trans- border social communication has been observed in the Russia-Belarus trans-border zones. The intersection of these borders on both sides has localized in several large channels that run alongside main automobile or railroad lines. The trans-border territory divides into two types of areas: contact and border-zone barriers.
Migration is a powerful driver and important consequence of economic, political and social change. Because of its great impact on societies, migration needs to be adequately measured and understood. Reliable statistical data is the key to the basic understanding of this important phenomenon. Yet, in many countries, even the most general statistics on migration are incomplete, out-of-date or do not exist. Improvement in this area requires knowledge of the principles of collecting, compiling and analyzing migration statistics. Likewise, policymakers and other users need to be aware of the definitions and measurement issues related to the data to be able to interpret them. The present guide was prepared under the responsibility of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in the framework of the project “Strengthening national capacities to deal with international migration: maximizing development benefits and minimizing negative impacts”. The project involved all five regional commissions of the United Nations and was financed from the United Nations Development Account. The guide is intended for practitioners and professionals whose work is related to migration and migration statistics. It focuses on the specific context of migration processes in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We expect that the practical examples and international recommendations presented herein stimulate interest and improve understanding and facilitate production, dissemination and use of statistics on international migration.
The author shows that demographic transition is an organic part of civilization developments. Such phenomen as death rate and birth rate, changes in character of migration are connected with stages of development of a civilization.
Migration is a powerful driver and important consequence of economic, political and social change. Because of its great impact on societies, migration needs to be adequately measured and understood. Reliable statistical data is the key to the basic understanding of this important phenomenon. Yet, in many countries, even the most general statistics on migration are incomplete, out-of-date or do not exist. Improvement in this area requires knowledge of the principles of collecting, compiling and analyzing migration statistics. Likewise, policymakers and other users need to be aware of the definitions and measurement issues related to the data to be able to interpret them. The present guide was prepared under the responsibility of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in the framework of the project “Strengthening national capacities to deal with international migration: maximizing development benefits and minimizing negative impacts”. The project involved all five regional commissions of the United Nations and was financed from the United Nations Development Account. The guide is intended for practitioners and professionals whose work is related to migration and migration statistics. It focuses on the specific context of migration processes in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We expect that the practical examples and international recommendations presented herein stimulate interest and improve understanding and facilitate production, dissemination and use of statistics on international migration.
The report provides a review of sources and quality of statistics on international migration in selected countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS): Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Russian Federation and Tajikistan. The report was prepared under the responsibility of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe in the framework the project “Strengthening national capacities to deal with international migration: maximizing development benefits and minimizing negative impacts”.
In the article authors use the vital birh and death registration data on 10 regions exctracted from the Rosstat database to evaluate an input of international migrant into Russian fertility and mortality levels.
In the early twentieth century, a large number of households resettled from the European to the Asian part of the Russian Empire. We propose that this dramatic migration was rooted in institutional changes initiated by the 1906 Stolypin land titling reform. One might expect better property rights to decrease the propensity to migrate by improving economic conditions in the reform area. However, this titling reform increased land liquidity and actually promoted migration by easing financial constraints and decreasing opportunity costs. Treating the reform as a quasi-natural experiment, we employ difference-in-differences analysis on a panel of province-level data that describe migration and economic conditions. We find that the reform had a sizeable effect on migration. To verify the land liquidity effect, we exploit variation in the number of households participating in the reform. This direct measure of the reform mechanism estimates that land liquidity explains approximately 18% of migration during this period.
In this paper we study convergence among Russian regions. We find that while there was no convergence in 1990s, the situation changed dramatically in 2000s. While interregional GDP per capita gaps still persist, the differentials in incomes and wages decreased substantially. We show that fiscal redistribution did not play a major role in convergence. We therefore try to understand the phenomenon of recent convergence using panel data on the interregional reallocation of capital and labor. We find that capital market in Russian regions is integrated in a sense that local investment does not depend on local savings. We also show that economic growth and financial development has substantially decreased the barriers to labor mobility. We find that in 1990s many poor Russian regions were in a poverty trap: potential workers wanted to leave those regions but could not afford to finance the move. In 2000s (especially in late 2000s), these barriers were no longer binding. Overall economic development allowed even poorest Russian regions to grow out of the poverty traps. This resulted in convergence in Russian labor market; the interregional gaps in incomes, wages and unemployment rates are now below those in Europe. The results imply that economic growth and development of financial and real estate markets eventually result in interregional convergence.
The article contains a one-year forecast for developing of Russian cross-border cooperation policy and practice. The author shares her expectations about the inter-regional relations in Russian-European and Russian-Post-Soviet directions. Such an important idea as a definition of the fundamental reason for current speed and quality of cross-border cooperation in Russia is advanced for the discussion of scientific community.
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.