New technologies and regional development in the modern period

The article describes the possible impact of modern technological changes (disruptive technologies, digitalization, and automation) on regional development in Russia based on the patterns of geography of innovations and previous trends. The rates of non-resource growth over the past twenty years have been higher in those regions where inventive activity, intensity of R&D expenditures, share of researchers and employees with higher education were higher, but the same relationship cannot be traced with the intensity of the use of advanced production technologies (automation) and the availability of the Internet. During the declared pandemic in Russia in 2020, patent activity in the vast majority of regions decreased, the processes of production automation slowed down, but digitalization accelerated in terms of internet access and the development of online commerce. The creation of disruptive technologies is still concentrated in large cities and super-regions due to agglomeration effects, knowledge spillovers and concentration of human capital. But the effects of their introduction and distribution can be differentiated. In the leading regions with high proportion of creative professionals and entrepreneurs, development may accelerate, in old industrial regions, automation will increase the risks of temporary unemployment and inequality. For the least developed territories, the lack of digitalization potential and lack of highly qualified personnel may further worsen the situation.

Difference in intensity of exchange rate factors in countries with targeting inflation regime

The paper analyzes features of prime factors of nominal exchange rate in countries with inflation targeting regime and high cross-border financial openness. The paper aims to test the hypothesis about different strength of these factors in developed countries and emerging market economies (EMEs). Using a panel vector autoregressive model and panel data for 2010 — 1st half-year 2020 period for 9 developed countries and 10 EMEs, the paper estimates significance of factors from the side of global commodity and financial markets, as well as the side of national monetary policy. The paper finds some evidence of greater sensitivity of EMEs’ nominal exchange rate to global commodity and financial market factors and a greater sensitivity of developed countries’ nominal exchange rate to national monetary policy. The paper regards this result as an argument for EMEs’ exchange rate policy specification, considering the necessity to cope with heightened exchange rate volatility in these countries under the influence of external factors.

On financing the state assignments to higher education institutions to perform research and development projects

The paper presents the issues of higher education institutions research activities efficiency and financing. Empirical data on the Russian higher education institutions research activities efficiency have been investigated. A new model for higher education institutions research activities public financing has been suggested. The model developed a methodology for calculating subsidies for basic, guaranteed funding of scientific activities of universities, designed to compensate for the cost of simple reproduction of their scientific potential. The integral index, which allows accounting the influence of statistically significant factors on the total amount of research and development work performed by the University, is formed and justified by methods of econometric modeling. The proposed approach allows us to calculate the amount of guaranteed funding for the scientific activities of each university in the planning period with a known amount of financial resources allocated for the basic financing of scientific activities of universities in the country.

Economic journals in the optics of scientometrics

The paper discusses the ranking of journals based on the alternative to Scientometrics, where the basic unit of information is not the citation rate of publications, but their qualitative characteristics, obtained on the basis of the regular sociological survey of the economists’ community conducted by the “Journal of NEA” in 2020. The empirical data obtained made it possible to determine the size of the audience of each journal. The paper shows that the size of the journals’ readership has a direct impact on the respondents’ assessments of the quality of publications and scientific authority of the journals. The ranking of economics journals by each particular criterion — “Interest in Journal Publications”, “Scientific Level of Journals” and “Public Prestige of Journals” is presented. Use of the “Multiway data analysis” methodology has provided measurement not only of particular criteria that reflect hidden relations between their characteristics, but also determined the weight function of their aggregation in the aggregate ranking of journals — the “Ranking-2020”. The article also contains a comparative analysis of ranking the journals on the basis of the “Rating-2020” and re-rating of the RSCI and criticizes RSCI criteria “Science Index” and “Public Examination”.

Research results and bibliometrics: Is a contradiction anatagonistic?

The legislative reforming of the Russian Academy of Sciences was activated in 2013. Not a consequence, but an important tool for the implementation of this reform and its deepening has become «digitalization» in the form of an exaggerated presentation of the results of scientific activity as bibliometric indicators, including the quality and number of publications. Based on the data of the Russian Science Citation Index the article examines the results of the policy of «increasing the visibility» of Russian economic science in the world publication space. It is shown that in a relatively short time, both extensive and intensive factors of increasing the publication mass are practically exhausted. At the same time, the qualitative parameters of publication activity turn out to be of low variability depending on the dynamics of the publications themselves. The issues of displaying the quality of scientific journals in bibliometric indicators are discussed. The conclusion is made that there is no antagonism between bibliometric and expert metrics when the latter prevail. A sequence of using these metrics is proposed for a comprehensive assessment of the results of scientific activities of organizations and scientists.

Banks behavior patterns as a response to the population financial activity in the macroeconomic shocks in Russia

This paper finds out the behavior patterns of the Russian banking sector and systemically important banks in response to changes in the population financial activity under the economic shocks. The results show that the Russian banking sector has a behavior pattern that includes the sequence of actions: the outflow of deposits — vulnerability to non-repayment of loans — deposit bubble — credit bubble. We find no consistent evidence that systemically important banks show the same sequence of actions during the crises. We also find that the banking sector behavior and systemically important banks’ behavior varied in 2008–2009, but became the same in the crisis of 2014–2015. The coincidence of behavior patterns of the banking sector and systemically important banks increases the systemic risk. Research on intragroup differences between systemically important banks will allow finding solutions to reduce the risk.

Economic journals of Russia, their characteristics and network analysis

We study economic journals published in Russia and indexed in the Russian Index of Science Citation (RISC). We analyze citations of 466 journals for 2016–2020 and compare these journals using several metrics: total citation count, Hirsch index, Impact factor RISC, and Science Index RISC. We also use network analysis for citation graphs and compare journals by centrality indices: Copeland index and two new indices: Bundle and Pivotal. We found that “Voprosy Ekonomiki” is the only journal that is among the top-5 journals for all metrics. Other top journals differ for different metrics. We noticed that some top journals have a questionable reputation and the reason why they are among the top journals is a high number of publications, which makes classical journals less influential with respect to the metrics.

Fiscal decentralization in pandemic and post-pandemic times

In 2020, many countries, including Russia, faced a unique situation in which subnational authorities were forced to take on new powers to combat the pandemic and its consequences. At the same time, fiscal decentralization, which can be characterized by indicators of decentralization of income, expenditures or as tax decentralization, has decreased. The share of intergovernmental transfers in the revenues of regional budgets has increased. Before that, attempts to increase the role of the regional level in the country’s budget system were made in Russia, but they usually ended in failure. The article shows that the multidirectional trends of the 2020 crisis determined the new state of regional budgets and their dependence on the federal center. At the same time, it is transfers from the federal budget that have become the leading factor in resilience to shocks in regional budgets.

Spatial development in the post-COVID period: New challenges or old problems?

The article shows that the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has not lead to the emergence of fundamentally new patterns of spatial development, but has escalated its old problems. Thus, the importance of the largest cities in the country’s economy has not decreased at all. On the contrary, their traditional advantages have revealed, including those connected with an increased level of education of residents. But at the same time, the most important problem of the largest cities has also aggravated, and cannot be ignored — that is strong social stratification of citizens. The development of remote employment, the scale of which will obviously be greater than pre-crisis, may lead to changes in the settlement system within urban agglomerations, but not beyond them. This is due to the potential dominance of not completely remote, but combined employment, which is necessary to ensure the transfer of implicit knowledge. But even within urban agglomerations, the possible scale of changing permanent residence due to a number of factors (climate, features of the housing stock, availability of infrastructure facilities) is very limited, the most important will be an increase in the duration of stay in dachas. This will further aggravate the existing complex of problems associated with the extremely weak consideration of the actual life of people on two houses in the activities of the authorities.

Is Eurozone accumulating a historic lag toward Asia in the COVID-19 context?

The COVID-19 epidemic has shaken the world and affected the global economy. Coming from China, this epidemic has hit different countries in a close succession. Western Europe and the Eurozone were severely hit by the pandemy. The so-called “2nd wave” is creating havoc even in the countries that had quite well managed before – during the 1st wave of Spring 2020. Even with the vaccine, it is quite probable that economic recovery will be postponed to 2022–2023. Would the Eurozone accumulate a historic lag compared to Asia in the pandemy context? Analyses done by the end of September 2020, that is before the 2nd epidemic wave struck Europa, were already showing that the EU and the Eurozone, as some other advanced economies, fared worse in that context. This 2nd wave would quite probably strengthen this lagging.