Book
Russie 2013. Regards de l’Observatoire franco-russe
The book is devoted to the tendencies of Russian economy, domestic policy, foreign policy and defence policy development in 2012. It also provides forecast for development of the country in 2013.
The article analyses worsening of the US-Russia Relations in 2012. It discusses domestic and foreign policy reasons of the relations deterioration, explores the nature of the relations, and provides forecast for the near- and middle-term future. The paper also provides analyses of the model of "selective pragmatic cooperation" between the US and Russia, which emerged by the biginning of 2013.
This paper puts forth a comprehensive set of measures to address the current economic crisis, prevent its further aggravation and ensure sustained and ongoing development of the Russian economy. In this study we seek to adopt the viewpoint of common sense and keep free from political and ideological bias. This is why we believe the proposed solutions should be implemented by any reasonable government irrespective of its political coloration. This text presents our vision of the Russian economy and its problems.
The book is dedicated to the general trends in Russian business.
The article considers the processes of progress in production and service sectors and answers the question how and thanks to what service sector of Russian economy left the productive one behind (concerning contribution in GDP of our country). The rates of development of service sector turned out to be so high firstly - as a reason of peculiarities of new Russian economy, which historically was built on the market principles and was developing in conditions of investment resources deficit, secondly - as a reason of system differences between «physical» goods and services as an object of sale. Nowadays Russia faces an unusual symbiosis: effective service companies, operating in hard competitive sphere with average profitability and non-affective from the point of management industrial companies, which thanks to monopolistic pricing have great profitability, providing profits of Russian budget and determining a macroeconomic situation.
There are a number of stereotypes regarding the investment attractiveness of Russian enterprises. Local companies often do not see any development prospects in Russia and complain at the unsatisfactory local institutional environment. However, the activity of multinational corporations (MNCs) in Russia serves as a clear evidence of its potential attractiveness as one of the BRICS markets (the so called "21st century markets"). This article discusses the activities of MNCs aimed to increase market representation in Russia, as well as the reasons for such behavior.
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.