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Вопросы современной филологии и методики обучения языкам в вузе и школе. ХV Международная научно-практическая конференция
In the transition to a market economy, the Russian workforce underwent a wrenching period of change, with excess supply of some industrial skills coexisting with reports of skills shortages by many enterprises. This paper uses data from the Russia Competitiveness and Investment Climate Survey and related local research to gain insights into the changing supply and demand for skills over time, and the potential reasons for reported staffing problems and skills shortages, including labor turnover, compensation policies and the inhibiting effects of labor regulations. It discusses inservice training as an enterprise strategy for meeting staffing and skills needs, and presents evidence on the distribution, intensity and determinants of in-service training in Russia. It investigates the productivity and wage outcomes of in-service training, and the supportive role of training in firms’ research and development (R&D) and innovative activities. A final section concludes with some policy implications of the findings.
Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.