As the situation with COVID-19 has shown, mistakes associated with insufficiently developed policy measures in medicine, science, education and other socially significant sectors of the economy are very costly for society. In the July issue of Nature, Leonid Gokhberg, First Vice Rector of HSE University and ISSEK Director, discussed the topic of the growing practice of making management decisions based on big data analysis.
HSE experts have analyzed the position of Russian non-commodity sectors in global production and opportunities for their revitalization. The researchers believe that long-term sustainable growth of its non-commodity exports can be achieved by repositioning and including them in the global value chain at some more advanced stages than the supply of raw materials and semi-finished products.
HSE University’s Centre of Development Institute has conducted its regular quarterly survey of experts’ projections for the Russian economy in the 2020–2021 period. According to the consensus forecast, Russia’s GDP will decrease by 4.3% this year. This seems to be a more optimistic outlook compared, for example, to the IMF’s forecast, which suggests a 5.5% decline.
In a recent report, HSE experts evaluated the world’s 14 countries hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic based on data (including the number of recorded deaths) from May 1, 2020 or later. The report also examined 16 other countries whose experience was considered significant. While refraining from making generalizations, experts nonetheless noted that leaders in Europe and the United States have generally not responded to the situation as effectively as their Asian counterparts. Africa, meanwhile, follows its own course, while the situation in Brazil is worse.
Traditional urban planning in the United States and Europe developed in response to the epidemics of cholera, tuberculosis, and typhoid. In an op-ed for RBC, Nadezhda Khort, curator of the Shukhov Laboratory of Experimental Urban Design and the Master’s programme ‘Prototyping Future Cities’ in the Vysokovsky Graduate School of Urbanism, considers the skills and practices cities should employ in post-pandemic urban development.
A large-scale study conducted by the HSE Laboratory for Media Communications in Education found that the situation with online education is better than was first thought when schools had to switch to Internet-based learning to help stop the spread of coronavirus infections.
The HSE Institute for Social Policy is renewing its monitoring of the population’s socio-economic status and social well-being. The first issue includes a 2019 summary and short analysis of the trends related to the Covid-19 pandemic. Experts have concluded that many unfavourable trends were not overcome last year and that the current crisis will worsen the situation.
Mikhail Blinkin, Director of the HSE Institute for Transport Economics and Transport Policy Studies, speculated about whether private automobile transportation will expel buses and trams from city streets in the post-virus future.
The OECD Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy (STP) held its first meeting of the year in early April. HSE staff members Mikhail Gershman, Dirk Meissner and Elena Sabelnikova joined Ministry of Education and Science representatives as members of the Russian delegation to the event. Here, they explain which approaches participants discussed for combating the coronavirus and for preventing other global crises.
From April 6–7, the HSE Centre of Development Institute conducted a special survey among professional forecasters on the Russian economy’s prospects for 2020-2021. The experts expect a decline this year due to the coronavirus pandemic and low oil prices this year, but predict that the losses will be fully recouped in 2021.
