Is It Possible to Monetarily Quantify the Emotional Value Transferred by Companies and Organizations? An Emotional Accounting Proposal

Social accounting focuses on value transactions between organizations and their stakeholders; both market ones, where the value perceived by the different stakeholders is identified, and non-markets ones, where transactions are monetized at their fair value. There was long awareness of an emotional value translation, linked to the transfer of different products, services, remunerations, and incentives, regardless of whether they were market or non-market. Yet that emotional value seemed to be anchored in the field of psychology and managed to elude economic science. This study seeks to identify emotional value with consumer surplus and, by extension, of the other stakeholders in a value transfer process. This proposal allows the emotional value to be anchored in the micro-economy and allows it to be objectively calculated using a regression involving three elements: the market price, the fair value interval, and a perceived satisfaction score by the different stakeholders in the form of significant sampling. The result obtained not only allows Social Accounting to be complemented with emotional value, but it also facilitates its incorporation in the strategy to optimize the emotional value. Furthermore, it enables a quantification of the perceived subjective utility, which opens up a research path where some possible lines are clearly identified.

Optimization of Credit Activity of a Commercial Bank Based on a Parametric Model

In the past few decades, a line of research focusing on the financial portfolios of banking structures has been actively developed in the world’s economic science. The interest in deposit-and-loan portfolios is caused by the rapid growth of both the banking sector and the entire capital market in the world. This paper presents empirical research in the field of analysis of the credit and investment activities of a commercial bank with an extended set of criteria. The team of authors considered a certain approach to parametric modelling of the optimal banking portfolio taking into account unregulated exogenous (macroeconomic) and endogenous (set by the bank) parameters that affect its structure and composition. As part of the proposed method, a list of monitored parameters of the banking portfolio, which was developed due to financial stability and reliability indicators, was compiled. Accordingly, based on calculations with a modified parametric model and assessment of the level of their financial stability and reliability, shortcomings in the structure and composition of the portfolios of the banking organizations under research were identified with respect to the rationality of resource allocation and the adequacy of equity capital. Thus, it was concluded that taking into account the criteria for managing the banking portfolio, measures of profitability and risk, as well as the reliability of the financial and economic base and financial stability of the bank contributes to the growth of its rating and client base, which is especially important for universal commercial banks. Received: 4 September 2021 / Accepted: 22 November 2021 / Published: 3 January 2022

Assessment of Oil Rent of the Russian Federation

The article presents the position of the author, relating to such an important economic concept as oil rent. The oil rent of the country, estimated in the world economic space, is determined and considered. A mathematical model is presented that allows calculating such rent using available statistical information. The method of obtaining initial data is described and the results of specific applied calculations are given. The interpretation of oil rents as super-profits of oil companies, established in economic science, affects, according to the author, only a part of the economic benefits that the country receives by developing its oil fields. If we consider such deposits as a natural gift, then it is possible, according to the author, to estimate the full size of this gift only as a result of comparing the real situation with the virtual one, in which there are no such deposits or they are, but are not exploited. The result of such a comparison is considered in the article as the oil rent of the country, estimated in the world economic space. As an illustration, the results of calculations of the oil rent of the Russian Federation for 2011, 2013, 2015 and 2018 are given. А brief analysis of the results obtained and their dependence on external economic circumstances is given. For the purpose of comparison, the calculation of the oil rent of Saudi Arabia for 2018 is given.

STATISTICAL ASSESSMENT OF THE ECONOMIC RESILIENCE OF THE REGIONS OF THE REPUBLIC OF BELARUS

The article discusses the main approaches to the definition of a relatively new term for economic science - economic resilience of territories. The author made an attempt to assess the level of economic resilience of the regions of Belarus on the basis of the 2015-2016 recession resistance index. and the index of recovery of economic dynamics in the post-recession period (2017-2019). This is the first time an analytical work of this level has been carried out in Belarus. It has been established that the central regions of the country - Minsk and the Minsk region - have high economic resilience. The author outlines the prospects for the use and methodological problems of assessing the economic resilience of regions in statistical science.

LABOR ECONOMICS AND LABOR LAW: METHODOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF CORRELATION

The article reveals the features of solving the problems of labor activity, proceeding from the study of the foundations of labor economics (as a direction of economic science, directly dealing with such problems) and the provisions of labor law (which regulate the process of ensuring everyone the right to work), taking into account the methodological aspects of correlation. It has been established that labor activity is a special form of professional activity of individuals, which is due to the use of scientific and technical means. It has been determined that one of the main problems of labor economics is the problem of a low level of labor productivity, the solution of which is possible through the development of scientific and technological progress, improvement of existing or development and implementation of new resource-saving technologies, improvement of the production process of product, automation of the production process, taking into account aspects of social processes and guarantees of ensuring the optimal level of remuneration and an appropriate level of social protection, the development of education and science, ensuring an adequate level of health care, guaranteeing labor safety, continuous improvement of qualifications and professionalism by employees. It has been proved that the efficiency of an individual's labor activity depends on his motivation. It was found that one of the problems underlying the economic science of labor is the problem of regulating the personal life and work activities of young professionals in the labor market, in particular – at the expense of ensuring decent working conditions and the right to an adequate level of remuneration. It was determined that in the implementation of strategically established tasks and priorities for the development of labor activity, a special role is played by the observance of the provisions of labor law. Labor law should provide for the proper regulation of relations in labor activity is provided, based on society's perceptions of aspects such as fairness and the framework of freedom. It has been established that changes in labor law for the better in accordance with the needs of the labor market will contribute to an increase in the level of labor productivity, an increase in the level of employment among the population, influence an increase in the level and efficiency of production, an increase in the level of wages, etc. It is noted that the prospects for further research in this direction should be the research of the features and practical aspects of the correlation of professionalism, professional culture, professional competence and professional training in labor activity.

The Scientisation of Economics

Lionel Robbins was appointed head of the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics (LSE) in 1929 following the sudden death of Allyn Young, the incumbent professor. Young had not made any significant alteration to the teaching at LSE, but from the very first Robbins set about reorganising the profile of economics teaching. The framework within which he did this was one of a ‘science’ based upon ‘economic principles’, and in 1932 his Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science provided the methodological template for his project. This work appears to owe a great deal to Austrian economics, but it can be demonstrated that this was indirect, chiefly through the work of Wicksteed and Wicksell, hence reflecting economics where it had stood in the 1880s. Nonetheless, Robbins was successful in repackaging this work, and his Essay stimulated the development of discussions of economic method. In addition, Robbins’s lectures provided the template for the textbook literature of the 1950s, cementing the influence of the LSE on the training of young economists. However, this training remained at the undergraduate level for the most part due to the lack of labour market demand for economists in Britain; in the United States, by contrast, graduate teaching became the motor through which American economics came to dominate the international teaching of economics.

The Shift toward Secular Ideology

Following the rise of the state, religion served to legitimate societies’ institutions, practices, and unequal distributions of income, wealth, and privilege. However, emerging capitalism and its expanding bourgeoisie in Western Europe challenged the Catholic Church’s monopoly on truth and meaning, opening space for secular legitimation. The science of political economy increasingly evolved as a principal body of social thought legitimating inequality. This transfer from religion to political economy begins with the mercantilists and is mostly complete by the end of the nineteenth century. Political economy’s principal inequality-legitimating doctrines include the utility of poverty, the justice of the invisible hand, the Malthusian population doctrine, the wages-fund doctrine, and the trickle-down thesis. Most of these doctrines take on more of a patina of “natural” science in the late nineteenth century when the neoclassical revolution in economics attempted to sever economic science from morality and politics and express itself technically with calculus.

Constructing Economic Science

Constructing Economic Science demonstrates how an existing public discourse, political economy, was transformed in the early twentieth century into a new university discipline: economics. This change in location brought about a restructuring of economic knowledge. Finance, student numbers, curricula, teaching, new media, and the demands of employment all played their part in shaping economics as it is known today. It was broadly accepted in the later nineteenth century that industrialising economies required the skilled and specialised workforce that universities could provide. Advocacy for the teaching of commercial subjects was widespread and international. In Cambridge, Alfred Marshall was alone in arguing that economics, not commerce, provided the most suitable training for the administration and business of the future; and in 1903 he founded the first three-year undergraduate economics programme. This was by no means the end of the story, however. What economics was, how Marshall thought it should be taught, had by the 1920s become contested, and in Britain the London School of Economics gained dominance in defining the new science. By the 1930s, American universities had already moved on from undergraduate to graduate teaching, whereas in Britain university education remained focussed upon undergraduate education. At the same time, public policy was reformulated in terms of economic means and ends—relating to postwar reconstruction, employment, and social welfare—and international economics became American economics. This study charts the conditions that initially shaped the “science” of economics, providing in turn a foundation for an understanding of the way in which this new language itself subsequently transformed public policy.

Crisis transformations of socio-economic systems

Crisis phenomena threats are growing on national and global scale against the background of tightened geopolitical and geo-economic competition. Such trends as destruction and degradation, are becoming integral parts of change in the vital function of economic agents, institutional structures at different levels. Therefore, the search for an alternative paradigm for the study and assessment of the transformations of socio-economic systems (SES) is one of the topical directions in the development of economic science. In the objective conditions of constant renewal of world economic relations, proceeding from the multilevel nature of social changes, the article substantiates the need for innovative ways to search, develop and implement strategic guidelines that exclude the raw type of economic development. From the standpoint of the self-organization theory, it specifies that an open system is, as a rule, in a state of unstable equilibrium. The article proves that the purpose of theoretical research and practical actions should be the implementation of controlled effective evolutionary and revolutionary qualitative changes. At the turn of the third millennium, under the increasing impact of periodic civilizational shocks at the stages of economic and political cycles, the determinants of SES stability change over a long period. The transformation of natural factors requires scientific understanding - from motive levers into constraints on the potential for economic growth. The growing volumes of services and the virtual economy are hardly comparable with the products of the industrial sector, while the excessive polarization of incomes hinders economic dynamics. Arguments are given that the processes of changing existing SES can be accompanied by their deformation. The forces of the fall are opposed by compensatory mechanisms of reimbursement for the loss of material, human, information resources. The author focuses on the need to organize and manage the new approaches to the management of SES changes, having in mind time and space scale of the development of integral, interconnected bodies of social and economic agencies at state, corporative as well as individual levels. Crisis shocks of SES transformation are mainly linked with reasons stemming from financialization processes, weakening of sovereignty due to the expansion of global value chains, as well as from major emergencies and disasters, unexpected climate changes, etc. The article suggests improving the conceptual apparatus of transformational changes. The leading trend in modern science is interdisciplinarity. Integration of various scientific disciplines should affect both economics and institutional, social, spiritual, ethnic, moral spheres of life.