Book
Прямые иностранные инвестиции в России: от точечной модернизации к стабильному развитию
In many countries, including Russia, models of bilateral investment treaties (or models BIT) have been approved, on the basis of which specific treaties between different countries are then concluded. In this article, the author examines several «schools» of bilateral investment treaties: American, European, and Asian. The study is based on an analysis of the practice of concluding bilateral investment treaties by foreign countries.
The main idea of this article is focused on the new phase of the state programs of investment treaties, which includes the analysis of new models of bilateral investment treaties and invalid old models of treaties of this kind. It ends up with an assessment of the effect which new models BIT can produce on future investment contractual relations between economic entities and the receiving investments of states.
This book is about twenty-year's experience of privatization in different countries including Russia. The book also includes sestematozation of academic views at the problems of state failures and effectiveness of the state owership.
We review the transition of the Russian banking sector focusing on the interplay between ownership change and institutional change. We find that the state's withdrawal from commercial banking has been inconsistent and limited in scope. To this day, core banks have yet to be privatized and the state has made a comeback as owner of the dominant market participants. We also look at the new institutions imported into Russia to regulate banking and finance, including rule of law, competition, deposit insurance, confidentiality, bankruptcy, and corporate governance. The unfortunate combination of this new institutional overlay and traditional local norms of behavior have brought Russia to an impasse - the banking sector's ownership structure hinders further advancement of market institutions. Indeed, we may now be witnessing is a retreat from the original market-based goals of transition.
The article is dedicated to fiscal incentives for business angels. Business angel, a comparatively new phenomenon in Russia, is defined in the first part of the article. The second part is a research of fiscal incentives intended for private investors in order to encourage them to support small innovative enterprises. The research is based on European and North American experience. Finally, the third part suggests the ways of creating a system of fiscal incentives for business angels in Russia.
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.