The widespread belief that wage increases in Russia outstrip growth in productivity is no more than a myth, Deputy Director of the HSE Centre for Labour Market Studies, Rostislav Kapelyushnikov claims in an article ‘Productivity and wages: a little simple arithmetic’. Besides, in recent years we have seen a fall in the cost of labour, particularly in industry.
On November 19-20, 2014 HSE hosted a conference on Global Governance: Nominal, Real and Alternative Structures. The conference was largely focused on the paradigm shift in geopolitical and geoeconomic structures of the modern world, as well as the underlying causes and long-term implications of such changes.
People's lives today are more flexible, while individual biographies – even though they may look like 'games without rules' to an outsider – are in fact carefully designed around personal choices. These are the main themes of a paper by Sergey Zakharov and Ekaterina Mitrofanova published in the monograph Russia and China: Youth in the 21st Century. Although the paper focuses mainly on young Russians' reproductive behavior, its content goes beyond demographics and addresses certain existential aspects, such as non-stereotypical biographies of modern people and their diverse identities, values, and desires.
On 3-4 December 2014 the inaugural BRICS and Emerging Economies Universities Summit will take place in Moscow. On 3 December the HSE will host its ‘Russian Universities Day’.
Contemporary Russia’s political system is becoming more and more similar to the Chinese one, while the Chinese economy is demonstrating stable growth and the Russian one is stagnating. Andrey Yakovlev , Professor at the HSE Department of Theory and Practice of Public Administration, believes that the Chinese were able to effectively use the methods of governance they adopted from the USSR. His paper ‘Incentives in the System of Public Administration and the Economic Growth’ was presented at the conference ‘Challenges for Economic Policy in the New Environment’.
In 2014 the working group of the Department of History of Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg won the university competition and received institutional support for the international research project ‘Comparative Historical Studies of Empire and Nationalism’. Ronald Grigor Suny is Charles Tilly Collegiate Professor of Social and Political History at the University of Michigan, Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History at the University of Chicago and Senior Research Fellow at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg. He talks his research interests in history and the International Research Project ‘Comparative Historical Studies of Empire and Nationalism’.
The HSE University District in Perm hosted the first International Scientific-Practical Conference to discuss the new stage of development of the University−School Cluster, investment in contemporary pre-school education and innovations in education in China and the US. HSE’s Deputy Academic Supervisor, Professor of Economics, Lev Lubimov, Honorary Professor at the Teaching College, Washington University (Seattle) Steven T. Kerr (via online conferencing), Director of the HSE Institute for Educational Studies, Professor Irina Abankina and Reader at the Chinese Academy of Pedagogical Research, Tsian Xiaoyang all took part.
The average Russian family lives on their salaries and pensions and only takes loans in exceptional cases. The vast majority of Russians are in fact millionaires, since almost every family owns their residence, while a third of all households also own other property, usually a 'dacha', i.e. a summer house. Thus, the combined value of assets owned by a typical Russian family exceeds that of many Europeans, according to the Russian Survey of Consumer Finance.
From November 10 to 14, the HSE Laboratory for Comparative Social Research’s (LCSR NRU HSE) 4th International Annual Research Conference ‘Cultural and Economic changes under cross-national perspective’ will take place in St. Petersburg. The programme includes dozens of themed sessions on current social, political and economic problems, and lectures by the world’s leading sociologists.
Muscovites who live between the capital’s Ring Road and the Third Ring Road are rooted in their region and, contrary to popular myths, do not try to move into the city centre. In their view, ‘Old Moscow’ is more a territory for rest than a business and residential area. This stereotype is also supported by Moscow’s radial ring structure, which is designed to regulate the influx of people into the city centre, Alexey Levinson said in HSE’s ‘Demoscope Weekly’ journal.
