Research & Expertise

This summer Helsinki hosted the large annual conference of the European Association for the Study of Religions. Iliyana Angelova (University of Oxford / University of Tuebingen) and Ksenia Medvedeva (HSE) share their impressions from the event and reflect on their experiences of having convened a session at an international conference of such a scale.

Nina Ershova, Research Fellow at HSE Institute for Industrial and Market Studies, examined Japanese companies' experience of investing in Russia. Her paper "Challenges for foreign investors in Russia: the case of Japanese companies" is based on findings from a survey of 32 companies — members of the Japan Business Club in Moscow, conducted between April and June 2015, and content analysis of twenty interviews with Japanese business, academic and NGO representatives conducted between 2008 and 2015.

Russia is 43rd in the Global Innovation Index (GII) 2016, up five positions from its 2015 ranking. Just as last year, Switzerland, Sweden, U.K., U.S. and Finland remain the top-ranking countries in the GII. These are the findings from the GII 2016 report comparing the performance of national innovation systems in 128 economies.

On July 23-28, 2016, the 24th IPSA World Congress of Political Science ‘Politics in a World of Inequality’ was held in Poznan, Poland. The event was organized by the Polish Association of Political Science and the Faculty of Political Science and Journalism of Adam Mickiewicz University. Over 3000 researchers, scholars and experts in political science and related fields from over 100 countries (including lecturers, students and doctoral students from HSE Faculty of Social Sciences) took part in the event. Plenary meetings, over 600 research panels as well as lectures by renowned experts, dedicated to topical issues of world policy and political sciences, were held during the congress.

Ivan Smirnov graduated from his master’s programme in Paris and hadn’t really considered coming back to Russia. But that was before he learned about the full-time advanced doctoral programme at HSE. The programme has some unique advantages among Russian programmes, which make it comparable to European PhDs.

In 2015, Russians’ trust in banks dropped sharply as the country’s economy faced a crisis, yet at the same time, the amount of individual bank deposits paradoxically increased, according to findings from a survey conducted by LSES as part of the "Monitoring Financial Behaviour and Consumer Confidence in Financial Institutions" project (2009-2015). 

The HSE Institute of Education has become a founding partner of the Institute for Global Educational Opportunity, an association of universities and research centres that study educational inequality. Representatives from Russia, the U.S., Germany, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Chili gathered in Washington to reach an agreement on joint annual conferences, publications, and research.

From July 10 – 14, 2016, the Third International Sociological Association (ISA) Forum of Sociology on ‘The Futures We Want: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World’ took place in Vienna. About 5,000 scholars from 126 countries took part in the event.

In terms of activity in lodging complaints with the WTO Court (the agency through which WTO members resolve their disputes), Russia has not advanced beyond South Africa. The United States and EU countries are currently the leaders in terms of WTO disputes. The low level of activity on Russia’s side is primarily due to its relatively recent membership in the organization.

On July 18-22 the 13th International Conference on Concept Lattices and Their Applications was held at HSE. The conference has been organized since 2002. This year it was held in Russia for the first time. The event was organized by the International Laboratory for Intelligent Systems and Structural Analysis and the  School of Data Analysis and Artificial Intelligence of HSE Faculty of Computer Science.