Platformed professionalization: Labor, assets, and earning a livelihood through Airbnb

This paper analyses processes of professionalization on Airbnb in Berlin, exploring who is able to take part most successfully in urban value creation processes facilitated by short-term rental platforms. In doing so, it intervenes in debates on platform urbanism that focus on the role of digital platforms in reconfiguring urban governance and livelihoods. Combining a political economic approach and affordance theory, I conceptualize professionalization as a particular platform logic that benefits Airbnb and hosts who are able to take part, while reinforcing existing inequalities. Drawing on eight months of fieldwork in Berlin, I show how these professionalization practices differentially affect the strategies and practices of hosts, offering benefits to some while worsening the position of others who are unable or unwilling to professionalize. As such, professionalization processes produce inequalities and power asymmetries both on and off the platform, between hosts as well as between the platform owner and platform users. In a context where a growing number of city-dwellers rely on platforms to generate their livelihoods, such power shifts resulting from platform dynamics have a significant impact on who is able to benefit from platformization and thrive in a platform society.

Critical analysis of methods for measuring and monitoring of the population life quality

One of the problems of public administration is the need to select the best criteria for assessing the quality of life of the population. The aim of the study is to provide a critical analysis of current approaches to measuring and monitoring the quality of life of the population. The object of the study is the quality of life of the population. The subject of the research is approaches to measuring and monitoring the quality of life of the population.The article provides a comparative characteristic of the prevailing classes of measures used in economics. The advantages and disadvantages of natural, monetary, physical, power, temporal, dimensionless units of quality of life have been analysed. The main foreign and domestic approaches to such monitoring have been considered and the positions of the Russian Federation in foreign ratings of the quality of life have been indicated. Using the methods of content analysis, comparison, systems analysis, expert assessment, etc., the features of contemporary quality of life assessment tools have been highlighted. Global, subnational and national quality of life assessment methods in relation to measurement tools have been compared and a comparative analysis has been presented in a summary graph.The author’s classification of quality of life management approaches has been presented. Historical and economic analysis allows us to distinguish between the monetarist approach, the social justice approach, and the physico-economic approach. Monetary methods of managing the quality of life of the population are based on financial and economic factors and monetary measurement tools, the social justice approach is based on the study of socio-psychological factors and life satisfaction indicators, the physical and economic approach reconciles the needs of the socio-economic system with the capabilities of the natural environment and uses power units of measurement. Foreign research in recent years has been dominated by subjective (socio-psychological) measurement methods, whereas in Russian research objective measurement indicators still play a major role in monitoring quality of life.The article offers recommendations for developing an improved methodology for assessing the quality of life of the population using social time.

To Assess the Activities of Self-Regulatory Organizations of Auditors

In the article, from the standpoint of economic theory, the construction of partial and integral assessments of the activity of the SROA is considered through the assessment of the quality of this activity (and not its effectiveness or efficiency). The expediency of using the method of point estimates and its specific application in the construction of these estimates is shown - both from the standpoint of the national economic approach and from the standpoint of the SROA itself. A table of 18 main activities of the SROA is compiled, based mainly on legislative acts. A number of organizational aspects of the evaluation of the SROA activity are analyzed.

China’s quest for oil: Brazil-China relations in the oil sector (2000-2018)

The aim of this article is to examine the increasing relations between Brazil and China in the oil and gas sector. In a political and economic approach, the objective is to understand the development of relations between the two countries amid the rise of China as a major power and as the world's main energy consumption center, by identifying the growth of Chinese influence in the energy sector through trade, investment and finance.

Economic Approach to Intergenerational Mobility

This chapter provides an analytical survey and synthesis of economic literature on intergenerational mobility in developing countries, with a focus on data and methodological challenges. Sample truncation from co-residency and measurement error cause substantial downward bias in intergenerational regression coefficient, whereas intergenerational correlation and intergenerational rank correlation are more robust to such data limitations. To understand heterogeneity, reliable estimates of both the intercept and the slope are necessary. The OLS estimate of the intercept is biased upward, but less so in the rank–rank regression. Sibling correlation is a broader measure of mobility, especially convenient with limited data. Estimating intergenerational causal effects is challenging as it requires long panel data. A promising alternative is to focus on the causal effects of policies on measurement of relative and absolute mobility, without disentangling the role of genetic inheritance.