Publications

The work is devoted to the analysis of entrepreneurial activities. The main purpose of paper is to better understand the institutional impact on entrepreneurship and business survival. Were used data from GEM (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor) for 98 countries throughout 1999-2016 as dependent variables such as total entrepreneurial activity (TEA), established business ownership (EBO), and early-stage business survival rate (EBO/TEA). As explanatory variables characterizing institutional environment we used the rule of law and control of corruption.The results show positive relationships between rule of law and early-stage business survival, and between control of corruption and early-stage business survival rate. Also the rule of law positively influence on level EBO. However, there was no evidence that rule of law and control of corruption are important for the total entrepreneurial activity.

The world heroin market today commands an estimated annual market value of US$55 billion and affects around 12 million people. After a short description of the current state of the world heroin market and its basic properties—maturity, segmentation, and elasticity—this chapter briefly outlines the history of heroin consumption and its regulation over the last 150 years. Historically, most interventions in the heroin market sought to curb its availability and consumption by using either vinegar (incarcerating drug sellers and users) or honey (diverting addicts to treatment). However, there is no conclusive evidence that either way is effective in reducing the number of heroin users and addicts; to a large extent, drugs become popular or fall out of fashion due to the natural history of epidemics and other social and cultural factors. Thus, the traditional drug policy goal of addressing the root cause—reducing the number of heroin users—is largely misplaced. Currently, many scholars conceive of “harm reduction” as an overarching goal of drug policy. As health-oriented harm reduction does not aim to curtail drug use per se but reduce some of its harmful consequences, criminological harm reduction applied to drug-related crime does not aim to prevent violation of drug laws per se but rather to prevent certain harmful consequences of drug use and sales. We then use the influential Goldstein model of drug-related crime to show how harm reduction principles can be applied to heroin-related drug crime. 

With rapid growth of online social network sites, the issue of health-related online communities and its social and behavioral implications has become increasingly important for public health. Unfortunately, online communities often become vehicles for promotion of pernicious misinformation, in particular, that HIV virus is a myth (AIDS denialism). This study seeks to explore online users’ behavior and interactions within AIDS-denialist community to identify and estimate the number of those, who potentially are most susceptible to AIDS-denialist arguments—“the risk group” in terms of becoming AIDS denialists. Social network analysis was used for examining the most numerous AIDS-denialist community (over 15,000 members) in the most popular Russian SNS “VK.com.” In addition, content analysis was used for collecting data on attitudes toward AIDS-denialist arguments and participants’ self-disclosed HIV status. Two data sets were collected to analyze friendship ties and communication interactions among community members. We have identified the core of online community—cohesive and dedicated AIDS denialists, and the risk group: users who communicate with core members, and, thus, can be more susceptible to the AIDS-denialist propaganda and their health behaviors (e.g., refusing treatment). Analysis allowed to significantly reduce the target audience for possible intervention campaigns and simultaneously increase the accuracy of determining the risk group composition.

Russia has had a high elderly share of its population like the OECD countries, but has had a more turbulent history over the past 100 years, which has caused fluctuations in the capabilities of those turning 60 (measured by education and training, income, enabling environment, medical care, and health status). This article analyses the life experiences and capabilities of five Russian birth cohorts turning 60 over the period 1990–2020. It presents relevant concepts, reviews past research, and evaluates the importance of health factors (health environment, health-related behaviours, medical care, health status) in determining the activities and contributions of older people in Russia. A Human Capabilities of the Elderly in Russia Index (HCERI) with 22 indicators is developed. Russian data are used in the calculation of the HCERI for the cohorts turning 60 in 1990, 1995, 2000, 2010 and 2020. The article then presents evaluations of the experiences and changes in capabilities for each of the five selected cohorts of the elderly in four periods of life: Childhood (1–15 years), Young Adult (16–49), Mature Adult (50–59), and Early Elderly (60–69). The implications of changes in the characteristics of the elderly for Russian government policies are discussed.

This work is devoted to estimating the individual return to worker’s profes- sional training. The research is based on the personnel records of Russian metal- lurgical enterprise (2006–2010). The main factors that distinguish this paper from others are the following: (I) We focused on the internal labour market, concluding that it has common peculiarities of wage setting concerned with training as an open labour market. (II) We show that mobility-friendly training programs give high re- turns, and not only in transition economies. (III) We suggest controlling for mobility by choosing a corresponding control group. (IV) We use a robust new specification that is reactive to different dynamics of the dependent variable in treated and con- trol groups in difference-in-differences estimates. (V) We compared three different kinds of training and our conclusions could have practical application. The best way to raise personal earnings is on-the-job training. The internal mobility caused by retraining courses has the same impact on workers as if they lacked retraining. The wages of workers trained in the same field grow randomly for a few months before and after training. Nevertheless it is difficult to prove the causal effect of this kind of

training on wage growth

Background

The HIV epidemic among people who inject drugs (PWID) in Russia continues to spread. This exploratory study examines how HIV-prevention measures are perceived and experienced by PWID in the northwestern region of Russia.

Methods

Purposive sampling was used to obtain a variety of cases that could reflect possible differences in perception and experience of HIV-prevention efforts. We conducted 22 semi-structured interviews with PWID residing in the Arkhangelsk and St. Petersburg regions.

Results

The main sources of prevention information on HIV for PWID were media campaigns directed to the general population. These campaigns were effective with regard to communicating general knowledge on HIV but were ineffective in terms of risk behavior change. The subjects generally had trust in medical professionals and their advice but did not follow prevention recommendations. Most informants had no or very little prior contact with harm reduction services. On the level of attitudes towards HIV prevention efforts, we discovered three types of fatalism among PWID: “personal fatalism” - uselessness of HIV prevention efforts, if one uses drugs; “prevention-related fatalism” - prevention programs are low effective, because people do not pay attention to them before they get infected; “state-related fatalism” – the lack of belief that the state is concerned with HIV prevention issues. Despite this fatalism the participants opined that NGOs would do a better job than the state as they are “really working” with risk groups.

Conclusions

As HIV prevention campaigns targeted at the general population and prevention advice received from medical professionals are not sufficiently effective for PWID in terms of risk behavior change, prevention programs, such as community-based and peer-based interventions specifically tailored to the needs of PWID are needed, which can be achieved by a large expansion of harm reduction services in the region. Personal communication should be a crucial element in such interventions in addition to harm reduction materials provision. Training programs, peer outreach, and culture-change interventions which try to alter widespread fatalistic norms or attitudes towards their health are especially needed, since this study indicates that fatalism is a major barrier for behavior change.

 

 

The article is categorized as a case study. In the paper described the experience of Saint-Petersburg branch of Higher School of Economics to optimizeUniversity management through a transformation of approaches to the administrative services. This optimization process should be handled by highly potential employees through their project management teams.

The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the experience of constructing the new organizational model at the University through the participation of the most talented employees and applying Scrum project management methodology in their activity.

The article presents the basic concepts of talent management in a modern University and major principles of the Scrum methodology. The results of monitoring, that identified the most important areas of activity in the formation of projects for members of the high potential group, are given in this paper.

The conducted study provides grounds for conclusions about the necessity of taking into account peculiarities of corporate culture in the implementation of new management arrangements. During this research was discovered that the main expectations of employees in the optimization of services associated with digitalize processes, transferring into electronic forms of most of the processes related to discussions, negotiations, provision of administration and management. At the same time, the established management approaches are often perceived format and dogmas not considered by the majority as considerable directions of transformation. This plan requires the participation of informal leaders, receiving direct support from the leadership to implement changes in favor of the optimization process.

It was established that the main objects for innovation are administrative processes which include financial, personnel and clerical services. The operation of these units requires special attention from the management of University because in many ways, can promote the formation of a favorable corporate environment of research fellows and teachers. The Scrum approach to the implementation of projects related to the optimization of administrative services brings of University managers at a higher level of involvement, and this effect extends beyond the talented employees’ group, which should be examined and discussed on a regular basis. The article draws a conclusion about the need for significant prior work to convey to employees information about the planned changes, and then the permanent information support within the implementation of projects.

The originality of the article is that it discusses an integrated approach for the implementation of decentralized management and optimization of administrative services. It is based on practical experience of monitoring the corporate environment of the University, as well as a description of the original Scrum method to implement the relevant projects using the talent pool of the University.

The article studies entrepreneurial activity in Russia. In order to select the most relevant areas for analysis at the country level, an overview of current research on entrepreneurial activity is presented. It includes the analysis of opportunities and constraints of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitoring (GEM) project, which has a unique, annually updated database that is used to comprehensively study entrepreneurship at the national and global levels. The article analyzes the dynamics of the level of entrepreneurial activity, the aspirations of entrepreneurs, the attitude to entrepreneurship in the society, the assessment of the factors that impede and stimulate entrepreneurial activity in Russia, as well as the changes that occurred between 2006 and 2016. It gives the possibility to assess the sustainability of the main indicators of entrepreneurial activity and the main trends in entrepreneurship development.

Importance Many economic agents hide the facts of bribery they were involved into, so it is important to study the nature of corruption perceptions to estimate the latent phenomenon. The difference between estimations on official data and perceptions prove that need. Moreover, anticorruption legislation may not work in case of strong pro-corruptive institutions.

Objectives Revealing relationship of corruption perceptions to different factors, especially for transitional economies.

Methods Nonparametric and regression empirical estimations. The relationship between corruption perceptions (CPI) and GDP per capita, wellbeing, shadow economy size and institutional characteristics, such as government quality.

Results We have found empirical evidence for the hypothesis that shadow economy and corruption can be both substitutes and complements, the last is true for high income and low shadow economy countries. If shadow economy is huge, the relationship vanishes. Income is relevant in macro-analysis, but on individual data the relationship does not seem to be strong. Institutional quality has negative relationship with corruption perceptions, both for formal and informal institutions. We also touch upon the question of the difference between informal institutions, such as trust, in developed European and post-socialist countries.

Conclusions and Relevance Results can be used in long-term anticorruption policy, as institutional changes can lead to lower corruption.

While a number of studies, based on cross-sectional data for Russia, have documented strong increases in female smoking during the past two decades, the analysis of longer-term trends in smoking prevalence is hampered by the lack of representative data for the Soviet era. In this paper we create life-course smoking histories based on retrospective data from the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring Survey of HSE (RLMS-HSE) and the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) which allow us to examine the dynamics of smoking patterns over the past 7 decades. We find that smoking rates differ most strongly by gender within all cohorts, but that this differential has decreased over time, driven by increases in female smoking and more recently by decreases in smoking among men. For both genders we observe that the education gradient has become steeper over time, with smoking rates having increased at a higher rate among those with the lowest educational attainment. These findings suggest that the development of smoking in Russia mirrors that described in the model of the tobacco epidemic and observed in Western high-income countries.

Based upon a survey of more than three thousand respondents and forty in-depth interviews, the aim of this article is to examine the impact of migration on sexual resocialisation. In particular, we show how living in London influenced the attitudes of Central and East European migrants towards pre-marital sex and homosexuality. While the general acceptability of pre-marital sex was not affected by time spent in London, differences were noted in the meaning attached to sex outside marriage in the United Kingdom compared with Central and Eastern Europe. Particularly significant changes were observed in our respondents’ attitudes towards homosexuality, with a greater liberalisation the result of extrication from mechanisms of social control, re-socialisation into new social norms regarding sex and sexuality, greater visibility of sexual difference in London and, in particular, inter-personal contacts with gays and lesbians. Limitations to the general liberalisation of attitudes were also noted.

Background: With the rapid growth of online social network sites (SNS), the issue of health-related online communities and its social and behavioral implications have become increasingly important for public health and healthcare. Unfortunately, online communities often become vehicles for promotion of pernicious misinformation, for example, alleged harm of vaccination or that HIV-virus is a myth (AIDS-denialism). This study seeks to explore the social structure and participants' behavior of the AIDS-denialists online community to identify and estimate the those who potentially are most susceptible to AIDS-denialists arguments  - “the risk group” in terms of becoming AIDS-denialists. Methods: Social network analysis was used for examining the most numerous AIDS-denialist community in the most popular Russian SNA “VKontakte”, which numbered 13000 – 15 000 members during the various stage of analysis. Qualitative content analysis was also used for collecting relevant for this study members’ attributes, such as HIV status and the extent of belief in AIDS-denialists arguments. Two datasets were collected to analyze friendship  relations between community members and their communication relations. Results: Using social network analysis combined with content-analysis we have identified the core of online community - cohesive and dedicated AIDS-denialists, and the risk group, which is not equal in composition to all peripheral members appeared in the online group. The risk group is the circle of users who engage with core members through online communication and may be more susceptible the AIDS-denialist propaganda. Analysis allowed to significantly reduce the target audience for possible intervention campaign and simultaneously increase the accuracy of user selection into the risk group (1369 users from the risk group is more than 10 times less than whole online group population counting over 15,000 users). Thus, online information interventions should be aimed at this risk group audience in the first place to prevent their adoption of AIDS-denialism beliefs, further spread of AIDS-denialism, and pernicious health consequences associated with being an HIV-positive AIDS-denialist. Conclusion: More research on influence of AIDS-denialism on HIV-positive online group members is needed. Of particular interest are longitudinal or case control studies that could detect the size of effect of AIDS-denialist propaganda that is communicated from hard-core denialists to the risk group, different factors associated with higher or lower susceptibility to AIDS-denialist views, and real health behavior change that occurs with becoming an AIDS-denialist.

Background: Despite Ukraine’s large population, few studies have examined social inequalities in health. This study describes Ukrainian educational inequalities in self-rated health and assesses how far psychosocial, material and behavioural factors account for the education gradient in health. Methods:Data were analyzed from the 2007 wave of the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey. Education was categorized as: lower secondary or less, upper secondary and tertiary. In logistic regressions of 5451 complete cases, stratified by gender, declaring less than average health was regressed on education, before and after adjusting for psychosocial, material and behavioural factors. Results: In analyses adjusted for socio-demographic characteristics, compared with those educated up to lower secondary level, tertiary education was associated with lower risk of less than average health for both men and women. Including material factors (income quintiles, housing assets, labour market status) reduced the association between education and health by 55–64% in men and 35–47% in women. Inclusion of health behaviours (physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption and body mass index) reduced the associations by 27–30% in men and 19–27% in women; in most cases including psychosocial factors (marital status, living alone, trust in family and friends) did not reduce the size of the associations. Including all potential explanatory factors reduced the associations by 68–84% in men and 43–60% in women. Conclusions: The education gradient in self-rated health in Ukraine was partly accounted for by material and behavioural factors. In addition to health behaviours, policymakers should consider upstream determinants of health inequalities, such as joblessness and poverty.

Having one of the highest physician-population ratios in the world, Russia – paradoxically – also faces shortages of physicians. This paper explores the reasons for this paradox through examining the structural characteristics of the Russian health workforce and its development. In comparing Russia with mainstream European countries and in particular the ‘new” EU countries we argue that the shortage of physicians is determined mostly by the prevailing model of health workforce development with its enduring emphasis on quantitative rather than structural indicators. First, the traditional perception of physicians as inexpensive health resources determines the long-term growth of their jobs – irrespective of the new opportunities for substitution and other structural innovations. Second, there is a persistent distortion in the composition of physician supply, of which the most important is the very low share and narrow remit of primary health care providers in comparison to European standards. Third, the international trends in the division of labor between physicians, medical nurses and allied health personnel are not followed in Russia with the result of an inevitable overburden of physicians, the reproduction of a large supply of physicians, while also the paradoxical shortage. Fourth, the system of professional development of physicians does not match international standards. Although with a substantial delay, Russia has now started transition to a workforce model focused on structural characteristics of human resources and so, in the final part of the paper, these new initiatives of the Government are critically assessed.

The evolution and outcomes of conflicts in Europe, including the current one in Ukraine, have been influenced by the dynamics of economic, technological and military balances, which in turn are affected by the economic warfare and sanctions that have been used to alter them. This article reviews defence economic concepts of relevance to the Ukraine conflict and then draws out lessons for the present concerning power balances, military capabilities, conventional deterrence, economic warfare and counter-measures against sanctions from experiences in Europe in the twentieth century. An evaluation is made of the impacts of economic sanctions on Russia and Ukraine in 2014–2016.

The present article studies the issue of the interrelation between the senior UN official – the Secretary-General and the main UN body – the Security Council. The nature of the Secretary-General role is ambiguous since the very creation of the UN. On one hand, the Secretary-General leads the Secretariat – the body that carries out technical and subsidiary functions in relation to other UN Main Bodies. This is the way the Secretary-General position was initially viewed by the UN authors. On the other hand, the UN Charter contains certain provisions that, with a certain representation, give the Secretary-General vigorous powers, including political ones. Since the very beginning of the UN operation the Secretary-Generals have tried to define the nature of these auxiliary powers, formalize the practice of their use. Special place among these powers have the provisions given in the Charter article 99. This article give to the Secretary-General the right to directly appeal to the Security Council and draw its attention to the situation that, in his (Secretary-General’s) opinion may threaten the international peace and security. This right was used by some Secretary-Generals during different crises occurred after the creation of the UN. This article covers consecutively the crisis in Congo, Iran hostage crisis and the situation in Lebanon. These are three situations that forced Secretary-Generals Hammarskjold, Waldheim and de Cuellar to explicitly use their right to appeal to the Security Council. Other cases in UN history involving the Secretary-General appealing to the Security Council while mentioning article 99 cannot be considered as the use of the nature of this article in full sense of its spirit. Such cases were preceded by other appeals to the Council on the same situations by other subjects (notably, the UN member states) or other actions that made Secretary-General to merely perform its technical function. The main research problem here is the search for the UN instrument that could grant the Secretary-General with political powers I addition to existing administrative ones. The outcomes of the analysis show that the main instrument of such kind is the UN Charter Article 99. However, the degree of its usage activity is decreasing over time.

This article presents the results of a research which purpose was to investigate the link between institutional features and the motivation of entrepreneurial activity on the country level. We evaluate the level of total early-stage entrepreneurial activity, and, more specifically, the share of necessity-driven entrepreneurship. Taking into account Scott’s institutional theory, we established the main factors of the institutional environment  — the regulatory, normative, and cognitive pillars. The empirical analysis was conducted using the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Survey for the period between 2009 and 2014; information for every country that participated in the project in that period was used in the article. Using data from various sources, such as Global Competitiveness Report, World Bank, Doing Business, Economic Freedom of the world, Hofstede’s Cultural Indicators, we identified proxy-variables for every institutional dimension of Scott’s theory. The results of our econometric analysis indicate that the regulatory, normative, and cognitive factors influence not only the level of total early-stage entrepreneurial activity, but also the share of necessity-driven entrepreneurs