Working paper
TFP Estimates and Frontier-generated Production Function: A New Dataset for Political Science
Over the past decade Russia has experienced stable economic growth with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growing by 7 percent per year from 1998 to 2007. While the nation still enjoys a relatively healthy growth rate, analysis shows that the sources for the future growth are limited and to boost growth Russia should rely on increasing labor productivity. Improving productivity will impose new demands on Russia's workforce requiring better skills to satisfy the needs of economy growth. The international business environment survey reports that Russia's private sector considers the lack of skills and education of workers to be the most severe constraint on its expansion and growth. Despite the very high level of formal education attained by Russian workers the problem behind this may be explained by the current quality and content of education, which does not develop the necessary skills and competences demanded by the labor market. This report examines the reasons and the consequences of this skills deficit, which constrain productivity and limits innovation ultimately stifling accelerated economic growth in Russia. The objectives of the report are: 1) to deepen the understanding of the structure and composition of this skills deficit by analyzing in detail the demand for and supply of particular cognitive and non-cognitive skills; 2) to review the capacity and problems of the current systems for skills provision in Russia both through the public and private provision thereby identifying some of the underlying reasons for this skills gap; and 3) to support the development of evidence-based policy making in professional education and training, which will lead to a system better responding to the challenges of the economy and labor market.
In this paper, we consider the following problem - what affects the amount of investment in knowledge when one of the network firms enters another innovation network. The solution of this problem will allow us to understand exactly how innovative companies will behave when deciding whether to enter the innovation network of another country or region, what conditions affect it and how the level of future investments in knowledge can be predicted.
This article studies the relationship between exporting and past productivity at the firm level. Panel data from two surveys of Russian manufacturing firms conducted in 2005 and 2009 are used. We analyse the difference between continuing and new exporters, and study how drivers to exporting differ if firms export to CIS or high-wage advanced countries. We find empirical evidence for the self-selection hypothesis: both continuing and new exporters are more productive and larger than non-exporters and export quitters. Path dependence in the nature of foreign trade ceased to exist: serving the markets of the former Soviet Union requires the same productivity advantage as exporting to the developed countries.
Over the past decade Russia has experienced stable economic growth with Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growing by 7 percent per year from 1998 to 2007. While the nation still enjoys a relatively healthy growth rate, analysis shows that the sources for the future growth are limited and to boost growth Russia should rely on increasing labor productivity. Improving productivity will impose new demands on Russia's workforce requiring better skills to satisfy the needs of economy growth. The international business environment survey reports that Russia's private sector considers the lack of skills and education of workers to be the most severe constraint on its expansion and growth. Despite the very high level of formal education attained by Russian workers the problem behind this may be explained by the current quality and content of education, which does not develop the necessary skills and competences demanded by the labor market. This report examines the reasons and the consequences of this skills deficit, which constrain productivity and limits innovation ultimately stifling accelerated economic growth in Russia. The objectives of the report are: 1) to deepen the understanding of the structure and composition of this skills deficit by analyzing in detail the demand for and supply of particular cognitive and non-cognitive skills; 2) to review the capacity and problems of the current systems for skills provision in Russia both through the public and private provision thereby identifying some of the underlying reasons for this skills gap; and 3) to support the development of evidence-based policy making in professional education and training, which will lead to a system better responding to the challenges of the economy and labor market.
The new economic-mathematical model based on complex variables theory and the new approach to complex variables usage in economics are suggested in the article. The comparison of modeling results of actual production processes using Cobb-Douglass production function and complex variables production function is conducted. It is shown that the instrumental base of economicmathematical methods can be widen with usage of complex variables theory.
Once the legacy of the global financial crisis has been overcome, global GDP could grow at around 3% per year over the next 50 years. Growth will be enabled by continued fiscal and structural reforms and sustained by the rising share of relatively fast-growing emerging countries in global output. Growth of the non-OECD will continue to outpace the OECD, but the difference will narrow over coming decades. From over 7% per year over the last decade, non-OECD growth will decline to around 5% in the 2020s and to about half that by the 2050s, whereas trend growth for the OECD will be around on average 1¾ to 2¼% per year. The next 50 years will see major changes in the relative size of world economies. Fast growth in China and India will make their combined GDP measured at 2005 Purchasing Power Parities (PPPs), soon surpass that of the G7 economies and exceed that of the entire current OECD membership by 2060. Notwithstanding fast growth in low-income and emerging countries, large cross-country differences in living standards will persist in 2060. Income per capita in the poorest economies will more than quadruple by 2060, and China and India will experience more than a seven-fold increase, but living standards in these countries and some other emerging countries will still only be one-quarter to 60% of the level in the leading countries in 2060. In the absence of more ambitious policy changes, rising imbalances could undermine growth. As the current cycle unwinds, the scale of global current account imbalances may increase and return to pre-crisis peaks by 2030. Government indebtedness among many OECD countries will exceed thresholds at which there is evidence of adverse effects on interest rates and growth. Global interest rates may therefore start to rise over the long-term. Bolder structural reforms and more ambitious fiscal policy could raise long-run living standards by an average of 16% relative to the baseline scenario of moderate policy improvements. Ambitious product market reforms, which raise productivity growth, could increase global GDP by an average of about 10%. Policies that induce convergence towards best practice labour force participation could increase GDP by close to 6% on average.
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.
The paper studies a problem of optimal insurer’s choice of a risk-sharing policy in a dynamic risk model, so-called Cramer-Lundberg process, over infinite time interval. Additional constraints are imposed on residual risks of insureds: on mean value or with probability one. An optimal control problem of minimizing a functional of the form of variation coefficient is solved. We show that: in the first case the optimum is achieved at stop loss insurance policies, in the second case the optimal insurance is a combination of stop loss and deductible policies. It is proved that the obtained results can be easily applied to problems with other optimization criteria: maximization of long-run utility and minimization of probability of a deviation from mean trajectory.