Book chapter
Избыточное неравенство и развитие человеческого потенциала
In book
This book directly confronts uncomfortable questions that many prefer to brush aside: if economists and other scholars, politicians, and business professionals understand the causes of economic crises, as they claim, then why do such damaging crises continue to occur? Can we trust business and intellectual elites who advocate the principles of Realpolitik and claim the "public good" as their priority, yet consistently favor maximization of profit over ethical issues?
Former deputy prime minister of Russia Grigory Yavlinsky, an internationally respected free-market economist, makes a powerful case that the often-cited causes of global economic instability—institutional failings, wrong decisions by regulators, insufficient or incorrect information, and the like—are only secondary to a far more significant underlying cause: the failure to understand that universal social norms are essential to thriving businesses and social and economic progress. Yavlinsky explores the widespread disregard for moral values in business decisions and calls for restoration of principled behavior in politics and economic practices. The unwelcome alternative, he warns, will be a twenty-first-century global economy in the grip of unending crises.
Grigory Yavlinsky is a Russian economist and founder and member of the Russian United Democratic Party (YABLOKO). As deputy prime minister of Russia in 1990, he wrote the first Russian economic program for transition to a free-market economy, 500 Days. He lives in Moscow.
Reviews
“Grigory Yavlinsky’s book is an important contribution to understanding the interplay between social norms and modern economy. The current global crisis makes his analysis especially relevant.”—George Soros
“Reading Grigory Yavlinsky's remarkable book, I was reminded of Adam Smith, also a moral philosopher concerned with the correlation between individual aspirations and the enlightened evolution of society. It is invaluable to have the perspective of an intellectual such as Yavlinsky writing in the shadow of swiftly moving events on the global stage. He explains how market mechanisms influence international developments ranging from instability in European markets to the recent ‘Great Recession’ in the United States.”—Vartan Gregorian, President, Carnegie Corporation of New York
“Yavlinsky provides a new and in-depth interpretation of the events leading to the current recession and broader interpretations of how to avoid future ones. Realeconomik has my enthusiastic endorsement.”—Michael D. Intriligator, University of California, Los Angeles
“With clarity and eloquence, Yavlinsky argues that the deepest cause of the global recession was the erosion of the world economy’s moral dimensions. As a professional economist who has long been a leader of the Russian opposition, he knows how to splice politics and economics. As a politician who has repeatedly declined high office on grounds of principle, he lends the book additional authority. Realeconomik is a work that will, I believe, help to spark a public debate on issues of profound importance for humankind.”—Peter Reddaway, George Washington University
The economic crisis has revealed three particularly vulnerable development in Russia in the last decade: a growing resource of expertise, aging equipment and the lag in scientific and technological progress, institutional obstacles to the growth of the market economy. The article discusses the components of economic growth. How quickly evolving new economy and whether overcome monocultural specialization of the country? How to make this growth sustainable and irreversible, everything been done to enhance scientific and technological potential of the Russian Federation, that these arguments comes from the myths that Russia - the best country in the world, and that reflects the actual trends that and that helps prevent the escalation of Russia from the industrial society to a post-industrial society.
The paper discusses how the russian labor market has been evolving over two decades of the transition. it starts with tracing key labor market indicators such as employment, unemployment, labor force participation, working hours, and real wages. Their dynamics indicate that the labor market tends to operate in a non-conventional fashion and far from the patterns expected initially. The authors argue that the current russian labor market represents a peculiar model that is different from what is observed in the rest of europe outside of the cis. having established this, they look at the institutional foundations that make this unconventional performance possible and proceed with discussing political economy and welfare implications. The findings are compared with the experience of other post-socialist countries.
In this paper the public-private wage gap is estimated by means both of the OLS and the quantile regression, which will provide a more complex picture of the distribution of the public-private sector wage gap. The author finds the existence of significant public-private wage gap (about 30%) considering both observable and unobservable characteristics of workers and jobs. Using the decomposition based on quantile regression helps to answer the question about the nature of the wage differences. The author comes to the conclusion that the main reason for the gap is the institutional mechanisms of public sector wages in Russia. The analysis is based on the data from Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS-HSE) 2000-2010.
The article is dedicated to the review of ways of looking at social space in the sociological theory. Basing on works of those authors, who paid special attention for this question, in the text there is considered the variety of theoretical interpretations and instrumental using the category of social space. The accent is made on application of space in the context of urban sociology. All the material is systematized according to division into three aspects of looking at social space: 1. the space of social actors's interactions; 2. the structure of status positions; 3. the connection of geographic space and social meanings that are attached to it.
In the article the international experience of management of employment in the public sector is shown, corresponding numerical calculations are given, the thought on possibility of its use in Russia is stated. The author believes that transfer of some functions into outsourcing in frameworks of the policy of the new public management (NPM) can be one of directions of perfection of the management of employment efficiency and payment in the public sector. Simultaneously he expresses his conviction that reduction of the number of the occupied should not be mechanical, but the thought over and gradual process assuming simultaneous increase of efficiency of activity in the sphere of the public management.
This paper represents a synthesis of few working papers of the author, published in various mostly foreign publications. In the paper the author examines social consequences and social prerequisites for specific role that Russian state and Russian audiences are playing in the media. In our opinion the situation in Russian media cannot to be perceived outside the context of social structure of the Russian society and the role of the state in this society.