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Очерки модернизации российской промышленности: поведение фирм
The chapter offers three analytical cases put together as a result of non-formalized face-to-face interviews. it is shown how different manufacturing enterprises - mature chemical firm within the vertically intergated holding, new machine-building plant which serve the demand of resource sector and the relatively new company with the foreign owner - undertake technological innovations. The barriers, motivations and risks which influence the decisions to innovate are descrived. In the end, we show how innovations affect the competitiveness.
This chaper refers to the problem of low productivity and weak competitive stand of plants located in small and particulalry small specialized towns as compared to firms in bigger and more diversified locations. The findingds imply that the urban size and density of economic space, as well as its excessive sectoral specialization significantly reduce the firm competitiveness. Yet, the sectoral structure matters: textile and garmet plants in small towms are most vulnerable. Minimal diversification of economic structure and sufficient scale economy at the plant level allow to reduce the negative effects of the urban size.
The chapter privdes insight into the specificity of innovations at the mature manufacturing firms in Russia. The findings show that the group of genuine innovators, which target at least the national market and undertake R&D is rather small and unstable. About 10% of large enterprises completed the technological upgrade and get ready for the innovative mode of economic growth. We did not observe the technological convergence. Instead the group of leaders close to technological frontire becomes stronger, while the outsiders fell further behind. Firms which innovate regularly take decisions on product and process innovations simultaniously, and we did not find any evidence that these decisions compete. Innovations are more likely to increase competitiveness when they are integrated into the investment process.
The chapter focuses on the alternative measures of the relative competitiveness of Russian manufacturing enterprises and on assessing the changes in the distribution of manufacturing firms by those measures between 2005 and 2009.
Economic nationalism advocates state intervention in the market to create favorable symmetry in economic interdependence with other powers. All major economies have ascended to greatness with state interventions, and economic liberalism becomes a mere covert economic nationalism by hegemons. Once in control over the levers of the global economy it is in the interest of the hegemon to propagate economic liberalism to integrate other powers into asymmetrical interdependent partnerships. The Trump administration's embrace of overt economic nationalism indicates the unravelling of the U.S. privileged geo-economic position. Relative decline is evident by a crumbling U.S. manufacturing base and narrowing superiority in innovations, the creation of alternative trade corridors outside U.S. control, and nascent rivals to the Bretton Wood institutions and the U.S. dollar. As geo-economic power shifts from the West to the East and invokes a global resurgence of economic nationalism, opportunities arise forRussia to develop more symmetry in the interdependent global economy.
The absolute majority of the countries participate in the process of the globalization. This multilateral process includes the unification of the economies of these countries into single institution. Russian companies and industry in particular have been successfully involved in globalization for several decades, but since 2014 rather severe sanctions have been imposed on the Russian economy. This research is aimed at determining the main factors and directions of globalization of Russian industrial enterprises in terms of sanctions.
Preserved from the seventeenth century, a corpus of documents that relates to Muscovite monasticism is vast and embraces a range of manifold texts such as acts, literary works, formal and official records, correspondence and testaments. The latter bring to the foreground various issues of interest, both for a historian and a philologist. Above all, the very fact of an ascetic monk legally bequeathing money and possessions and documenting it in a will demonstrates a certain gap between formal monastic rules, which on a regular basis include the vow of poverty and non-possession and real monastic practices. On the one hand, as we see from archived sources, it was not uncommon for a monk to compose and get approved a testament, thus bringing his worldly life into order before death; on the other hand, these monastic testaments were obviously to come into a conflict with a holy order of testator and with existing monastic rules, either oral or written. My principal goal in this article is to enhance our understanding of practical and conceptual aspects of a monastic life of the seventeenth-century Muscovy through discussing real practices of observation, neglection, and re-interpretation of the vow of poverty and non-possession by individual monks, as represented in their testaments – acts of last will. The study focuses on a peculiar document – a testament of a monk Simeon of Polotsk (1629-1680), a court poet and preacher of the Tzars Aleksei Mikhailovich (1629-1676) and Fedor Alekseevich (1661-1682). Simeon’s testament illustrates one of the ways in which monks used to reconcile worldly riches with keeping the vow and gives a glimpse of the everyday life of a monk, highlighting the ways in which money was earned and spent in monasteries.
The paper argues that when developing an explanatory model of the early-stage entrepreneurial activity level (measured by total index of early entrepreneurial activity - TEA) one should consider the ‘path dependency’ of the ‘institutional matrix’ of different societies. Otherwise one could wonder why some theoretical models of TEA determining factors, as provided by a lot of studies, are not statistically significant for younger market systems and entrepreneurship in transitional economies. However, comparing Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data with the scope of official statistics provides a deeper insight into adults’ intrinsic incentives to become entrepreneurial. A statistical analysis of national TEA levels does not support the thesis that TEA levels, and structure, change under economic slowdown. Therefore, it seems logical to suggest that to interpret the TEA level it is important to examine some fundamental specific of different types of national markets rather than just the actual economic situation itself. When testing this hypothesis, the authors compared the characteristics of GEM countries with stable, high or low TEA levels. A Fisher’s linear discriminant analysis (FLDA) is used to examine whether different groups of countries can be distinguished by linear combinations of predictor variables and to determine which variables are responsible for this separation. The FLDA model explains the parabolic form of the relation between the level of economic development and TEA. A database of independent variables includes some different quantitative, ordinal and nominal variables determining the context of the national capital accumulation history. Using FLDA, we argue, one might foresee future tendencies of TEA - not only for GEM participating countries.
The Arctic region is one of the most sensitive and vulnerable to climate change. The dramatic melting of Arctic ice has several negative consequences for the whole ecosystem as well as for a way of life of native people but it also creates new opportunities for the region. First, it opens up potential for exploitation of large deposits of natural resources such oil and gas. Second, it shrinks Arctic shipping routes which offer significant economic savings for many countries. These benefits has already attracted many countries, both Arctic and non-Arctic, thus resulting in potential conflict of interests. In our paper we present a mathematical approach to the problem of conflict resolution in the Arctic. First, we propose an approach how the level of interest in each part of the region should be evaluated with respect to main resources - oil, gas, fish and maritime routes. Second, we present several models of areas allocation to resolve the problem of conflict resolution. As a result, we applied several scenarios of areas allocation, evaluated their efficiency based on the total satisfaction level and identified conflict zones in the Arctic.
This article examines the industrial wastes and environmental effects of Soviet technological development through the history of the Karelian Isthmus, a border territory that had previously been Finnish. Focusing primarily on the history of two large enterprises – the Svetogorskii (former Enso) and Sovetskii (former Johannes) pulp and paper making plants, the authors illustrate the polluting nature of the Soviet economy in the 1940s-1980s. We contend that from the very beginning, important as they were for the USSR, the enterprises of the Isthmus were built into a system of shortages of techniques and materials that contributed to the hectic fulfillment of the plan. Producing pulp and pulp-based products remained a priority during the whole Soviet period. On the level of industrial enterprises, the Soviet system revealed itself as incapable of solving the problem of pollution and wasting. After waste treatment facilities developed by Soviet engineers in the 1960s turned out to be inadequate for dealing with increasing pollution, the Soviet authorities called on Finnish companies to carry out substantial modernization of a few enterprises on the Isthmus. This helped the modernized plants remain functioning in the age of economic crisis at the end of the Soviet epoch. Old problems, however, such as shortages and lack of expertise, remained pivotal, while new sources of pollution, such as carbon emissions, appeared. As a result, the level of contamination was still high and led to negative environmental impacts.