Book
Социально-экономические проблемы современного общества: материалы международной научно-практической конференции 1-2 июня 2011 года
Thanks to access to the ISI Web of Science international abstract database, provided by the National Research University Higher School of Economics to its staff, the author has carried out a systematic analysis of publications on corruption in the magazines abstracted from early last century tothe present year. The overview focuses on the mainthematic trends in elaborating subjects related tocorruption, identifies academic opinion leaders andpoints out national distinctions in corruption-relatedpublication activity. Based on a comparison of publications on corruption brought out in Russia and about Russia, an national corruption accountabilityindex of the subject is proposed. The bibliographicaloverview shows that, in the outside view, Russia has become a super-corrupted country over the last decade. Regardless of the actual state of affairs, such strong discursive stigmatization of the country leadsto additional negative consequences both for privatebusiness and for the state as a whole.
In 2006, Russia amended its competition law and added the concepts of ‘collective dominance’ and its abuse. This was seen as an attempt to address the common problem of ‘conscious parallelism’ among firms in concentrated industries. Critics feared that the enforcement of this provision would become tantamount to government regulation of prices. In this paper we examine the enforcement experience to date, looking especially closely at sanctions imposed on firms in the oil industry. Some difficulties and complications experienced in enforcement are analysed, and some alternative strategies for addressing anticompetitive behaviour in concentrated industries discussed.
We address the external effects on public sector efficiency measures acquired using Data Envelopment Analysis. We use the health care system in Russian regions in 2011 to evaluate modern approaches to accounting for external effects. We propose a promising method of correcting DEA efficiency measures. Despite the multiple advantages DEA offers, the usage of this approach carries with it a number of methodological difficulties. Accounting for multiple factors of efficiency calls for more complex methods, among which the most promising are DMU clustering and calculating local production possibility frontiers. Using regression models for estimate correction requires further study due to possible systematic errors during estimation. A mixture of data correction and DMU clustering together with multi-stage DEA seems most promising at the moment. Analyzing several stages of transforming society’s resources into social welfare will allow for picking out the weak points in a state agency’s work.