Pendulum Migration Lowers the Quality of Life in the Regions
Every day, about one million residents of Moscow’s surrounding regions commute to work in the city. Remote districts are losing prospective labour resources, and the contrast between the quality of life in Moscow’s centre and its outskirts is growing increasingly more noticeable. The HSE online journal Demoscope Weekly analysed the commuting practices of Moscow region residents.
Regional Expansion Will Facilitate Business Growth
Medium-sized businesses in Russia are set to grow thanks to regional expansion and a broadening of the selection of goods and services. The School of Marketing and Business Development at the HSE has conducted the following research: 'Business Development: Current trends. Business practices of medium-sized companies in Russia in 2013.'
Fines and Trust in the Government Stimulate Tax Payments
A high level of trust in state institutions and fines for defaulters contribute to better tax collection. During the international scientific conference Culture, Diversity, and Development, Alexey Belianin, Head of the HSE Laboratory of Experimental and Behavioral Economics, presented ‘Tax Payments and Trust: A Cross-Country Empirical Analysis’, research conducted by an international group of scientists.
Social Networks Rule the Photo Market
Social networks are one of the reasons for the growing demand for professional photography. Social networks allow anyone to create their public image in a virtual reality. Anastiasia Evstratova has been studying the mechanisms of demand on the photo market, as well as the functions of photography for photographers and their clients.
Minimum Monthly Wage Raise Leads to Growing Informal Employment
Minimum Monthly Wage (MMW) is a bad institution for fighting poverty and inequality. One of the reasons for this is Russia’s high heterogeneity. Raising MMW often leads to the death of companies and a growing shadow labour market, Alexey Oshchepkov concludes this in his study ‘Minimum Wage’s Influence on the Labour Market in Russia’.
Think Tanks Need a Development Strategy
A number of fairly strong independent economic think tanks have emerged in Russia, but their further development depends on whether they can maintain their independence and provide good analysis while responding to the new challenges posed by changes in demand for their services. These are the findings of a collaborative ARETT-HSE study.
Informal Employment: Money, but Not Happiness
Employees without a formal contract are less happy than those fully protected by the Labour Code, suggests the report by Ludmilla Leonova 'Empirical Models for the Correlation Between Unregistered Employment and Life Satisfaction'.
Russians Read Better Than They Count
Russians are well ahead of many other countries in terms of literacy and numeracy, but lag behind in computer skills, according to the OECD Survey of Adult Skills presented at the HSE on October 8, 2013.
Informal Activism Changes Russian Society
Natural disasters and the election results have triggered rapid development of informal social activity in Russia. Experts revealed some new characteristics of Russian civil society in their research ‘Russian Neo-Political Activism: Sketching a Portrait of a Hero’.
Competition will Take Russian Universities to a New Level
The self-sufficient and closed academic environment in Russia is an obstacle to the appearance of world-class universities, argues Maria Yudkevich in her article presented at the 4th International Conference ‘University Traditions: a Resource or a Burden?’