The Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration

Companies increasingly use micro-celebrities for product endorsement. However, there are concerns around the self-presentation and credibility of this source of information online. This study examines the relationships between source credibility, self-presentation, and consumer behavior towards micro-celebrity endorsements. In-depth interviews were conducted with 38 female active users of Instagram, from Russia, to explore the impact of micro-celebrities’ credibility and self-presentation upon consumer purchase decisions. This study attempts to construct an extended source credibility framework applicable to the online context. The findings show that users deem micro-celebrities credible if they follow certain criteria of online behavior and self-presentation.

A recent Climatic Change review article reports a remarkable convergence of scientific evidence for a link between climatic events and violent intergroup conflict, thus departing markedly from other contemporary assessments of the empirical literature. This commentary revisits the review in order to understand the discrepancy. We believe the origins of the disagreement can be traced back to the review article’s underlying quantitative meta-analysis, which suffers from shortcomings with respect to sample selection and analytical coherence. A modified assessment that addresses some of these problems suggests that scientific research on climate and conflict to date has produced mixed and inconclusive results.

The Slavic branch of the Balto-Slavic sub-family of Indo-European languages underwent rapid divergence as a result of the spatial expansion of its speakers from Central-East Europe, in early medieval times. This expansion-mainly to East Europe and the northern Balkans-resulted in the incorporation of genetic components from numerous autochthonous populations into the Slavic gene pools. Here, we characterize genetic variation in all extant ethnic groups speaking Balto-Slavic languages by analyzing mitochondrial DNA (n = 6,876), Y-chromosomes (n = 6,079) and genome-wide SNP profiles (n = 296), within the context of other European populations. We also reassess the phylogeny of Slavic languages within the Balto-Slavic branch of Indo-European. We find that genetic distances among Balto-Slavic populations, based on autosomal and Y-chromosomal loci, show a high correlation (0.9) both with each other and with geography, but a slightly lower correlation (0.7) with mitochondrial DNA and linguistic affiliation. The data suggest that genetic diversity of the present-day Slavs was predominantly shaped in situ, and we detect two different substrata: 'central-east European' for West and East Slavs, and 'south-east European' for South Slavs. A pattern of distribution of segments identical by descent between groups of East-West and South Slavs suggests shared ancestry or a modest gene flow between those two groups, which might derive from the historic spread of Slavic people.

Abstract In this article the authors investigate the relationship between culture and joint gains by examining the role of information sharing and power strategies in intracultural negotiations. Previously, the authors found that the relationship between cultural values or norms and joint gains was uncertain in six cultures: France, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, and the United States. Of the five values and norms measured, only norms for information sharing in negotiation were directly related to joint gains. This article explores and extends prior findings by investigating the strategies used by negotiators in the same six cultures. Cultures that maximized joint gains used direct information-sharing strategies or a combination of indirect and direct strategies. Power strategies may help or hurt joint gains, depending on a culture's values and norms for power and whether or not power-based influence is used in conjunction with sufficient information exchange. The findings suggest that understanding the other party's cultural characteristics and strategies can help negotiators plan how to focus on information exchange and deal with unusual power strategies that they may encounter.

BACKGROUND: The political and social transition in central and eastern Europe has been generally associated with widening educational differences in life expectancy. However, interpretation of these findings is complicated because the size of educational categories within the population has also changed. It is therefore important to disentangle these two phenomena. SETTING: The Czech Republic, Estonia, the Russian Federation and, as a western European reference, Finland, in two periods, 1988-89 and 1998-99. METHODS: Life tables were calculated in three categories: university; secondary; and less than secondary education. Changes in life expectancy were decomposed into contributions of population composition and within-category mortality. RESULTS: In Finland and the Czech Republic improvements are seen in all educational groups, with only a slight widening of the educational differences. Over 80% of the total life expectancy increase is attributable to improved mortality within educational categories. In Estonia and Russia, less favourable overall trends coincide with a dramatic widening of the educational gap. A decrease in life expectancy in those with low and middle education has been compensated for, to a small degree in Russia but a greater extent in Estonia, by improvements among those with higher education and by the improved population composition. For highly educated Estonians, the gains were seen at all ages, the greatest at age > or =60 years. In Russia mortality increased in those <60 years although compensated for by improvements at older ages. CONCLUSIONS: Russia and Estonia exhibit much less equitable transitions compared with the Czech Republic. Analyses of trends in health inequalities should capture the changing population composition. In Russia and Estonia an improved educational structure prevented an even greater decline in life expectancy. The highly educated Estonians can potentially catalyse a wider health progress.

Summary This paper reviews the literature on the determinants of entrepreneurial activity and investigates to what extent differences in population, business environment and cultural values contribute to explaining differences in entrepreneurial activity across Swedish municipalities. Individual characteristics and business environment are the most important factors in explaining entrepreneurial choice. However, we find that cultural values and, most likely, social norms also matter. The data suggest that individuals are more likely to become entrepreneurs where there are more entrepreneurs, even if entrepreneurial income is lower. We explain why and to what extent this may be interpreted as evidence of social norms.

The article considers the main challenges faced by the post-Soviet social sciences in the global configuration of knowledge, marked by omnipresentcoloniality. In disciplinary terms this syndrome is manifested in the social sciences/ versus area studies divide from which the post-Soviet is either excluded or equalized with postcolonial discourses. The situation can be described as a general invisibility of the post-Soviet space and its social sciences and scientists for the rest of the world and the refusal of the global North to accept the post-Soviet scholar in the capacity of a rational subject. The reasons for this complex intersection of the post-Soviet, postcolonial and other post-dependence factors are both internal and external, political and epistemic. Following the methodological principles of decolonial option the author analyses such specific elements of the post-Soviet stagnant configuration in knowledge production as the external imperial difference and the double colonial difference, the geo-politics and body-politics of knowledge the way they are reflected in the knowledge production and distribution, paying specific attention to the possible ways out of this epistemic dead-end.

BACKGROUND: Previous studies assessing the prevalence of COVID-19 sequelae in adults and children were performed in the absence of an agreed definition. We investigated prevalence of post-COVID-19 condition (PCC) (WHO definition), at 6- and 12-months follow-up, amongst previously hospitalised adults and children and assessed risk factors. METHODS: Prospective cohort study of children and adults with confirmed COVID-19 in Moscow, hospitalised between April and August, 2020. Two follow-up telephone interviews, using the International Severe Acute Respiratory and Emerging Infection Consortium survey, were performed at 6 and 12 months after discharge. RESULTS: One thousand thirteen of 2509 (40%) of adults and 360 of 849 (42%) of children discharged participated in both the 6- and 12-month follow-ups. PCC prevalence was 50% (95% CI 47-53) in adults and 20% (95% CI 16-24) in children at 6 months, with decline to 34% (95% CI 31-37) and 11% (95% CI 8-14), respectively, at 12 months. In adults, female sex was associated with PCC at 6- and 12-month follow-up (OR 2.04, 95% CI 1.57 to 2.65) and (OR 2.04, 1.54 to 2.69), respectively. Pre-existing hypertension (OR 1.42, 1.04 to 1.94) was associated with post-COVID-19 condition at 12 months. In children, neurological comorbidities were associated with PCC both at 6 months (OR 4.38, 1.36 to 15.67) and 12 months (OR 8.96, 2.55 to 34.82) while allergic respiratory diseases were associated at 12 months (OR 2.66, 1.04 to 6.47). CONCLUSIONS: Although prevalence of PCC declined one year after discharge, one in three adults and one in ten children experienced ongoing sequelae. In adults, females and persons with pre-existing hypertension, and in children, persons with neurological comorbidities or allergic respiratory diseases are at higher risk of PCC.

Abstract What effect does culture have on the achievement of joint gains in negotiation? Prior research has identified a number of strategies, for example sharing information about preferrences and priorities, eschewing power, that lead to the development of joint gains when both negotiators are from the U.S. Are these same strategies used in other cultures? Are other strategies used? How effective are negotiators from different cultures in realizing joint gains? These are among the questions considered by the authors, whose research is based on data collected from negotiators from six different cultural backgrounds: France, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, Brazil, and the U.S.

The Kets, an ethnic group in the Yenisei River basin, Russia, are considered the last nomadic hunter-gatherers of Siberia, and Ket language has no transparent affiliation with any language family. We investigated connections between the Kets and Siberian and North American populations, with emphasis on the Mal'ta and Paleo-Eskimo ancient genomes, using original data from 46 unrelated samples of Kets and 42 samples of their neighboring ethnic groups (Uralic-speaking Nganasans, Enets, and Selkups). We genotyped over 130,000 autosomal SNPs, identified mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal haplogroups, and performed high-coverage genome sequencing of two Ket individuals. We established that Nganasans, Kets, Selkups, and Yukaghirs form a cluster of populations most closely related to Paleo-Eskimos in Siberia (not considering indigenous populations of Chukotka and Kamchatka). Kets are closely related to modern Selkups and to some Bronze and Iron Age populations of the Altai region, with all these groups sharing a high degree of Mal'ta ancestry. Implications of these findings for the linguistic hypothesis uniting Ket and Na-Dene languages into a language macrofamily are discussed.

Collaboration patterns offer important insights into how scientific breakthroughs and innovations emerge in small and large research groups. However, links in traditional networks account only for pairwise interactions, thus making the framework best suited for the description of two-person collaborations, but not for collaborations in larger groups. We therefore study higher-order scientific collaboration networks where a single link can connect more than two individuals, which is a natural description of collaborations entailing three or more people. We also consider different layers of these networks depending on the total number of collaborators, from one upwards. By doing so, we obtain novel microscopic insights into the representativeness of researchers within different teams and their links with others. In particular, we can follow the maturation process of the main topological features of collaboration networks, as we consider the sequence of graphs obtained by progressively merging collaborations from smaller to bigger sizes starting from the single-author ones. We also perform the same analysis by using publications instead of researchers as network nodes, obtaining qualitatively the same insights and thus confirming their robustness. We use data from the arXiv to obtain results specific to the fields of physics, mathematics, and computer science, as well as to the entire coverage of research fields in the database.

What does food sovereignty look like in settings where rural social movements are weak or non-existent, such as in countries with post-socialist, semi-authoritarian regimes? Focusing on Russia, we present a divergent form of food sovereignty. Building on the concept of ‘quiet sustainability’, we present a dispersed, muted, but clearly bottom-up variant we term ‘quiet food sovereignty’. In the latter, the role of the very productive smallholdings is downplayed by the state and partly by the smallholders themselves. Those smallholdings are not seen as an alternative to industrial agriculture, but subsidiary to it (although superior in terms of sociality and healthy, environmentally friendly produce). As such, ‘quiet food sovereignty’ deviates from the overt struggle frequently associated with food sovereignty. We discuss the prospects of ‘quiet food sovereignty’ to develop into a full food sovereignty movement, and stress the importance of studying implicit everyday forms of food sovereignty.

The implementation of new automation technologies together with the development of artificial intelligence can free up a significant amount of labor. This sharply increases the risks of digital transformation. At the same time, certain regions and cities differ greatly in their ability to adapt to future changes. In this article, we seek to determine the capabilities of Russian regions to reduce risks and adapt to digital transformation. The literature stipulates that there are several factors able to reduce these risks. First of all, they are associated with retraining, ICT and STEAM-technologies’ development, the promotion of economic activities that are less subject to automation. As a result of econometric calculations, we identified several factors that contribute to the new industries’ development (in our case, ICT development), and, accordingly, increase regional adaptivity. These factors include diversification, the concentration of human capital, favorable entrepreneurship conditions, the creative potential of residents, and the development of ICT infrastructure. We identified several regions with high social risks and low adaptivity, which are mainly the poorly developed regions of southern Russia, where entrepreneurial risks are high, STEAM specialists are not trained, shadow economy is large. This work contributes policy tools for adaptation to digital transformation.

Abstract Carbon taxation is mostly studied in social planner or infinitely lived‐agent models, which obscure carbon taxation's potential to produce a generational win win. This article's large‐scale, dynamic 55‐period, overlapping generations model calculates the carbon tax policy delivering the highest uniform welfare gain to all current and future generations. Our model features coal, oil, and gas, increasing extraction costs, clean energy, technical and demographic change, and Nordhaus' carbon/temperature/damage functions. Assuming high‐end carbon damages, the optimal carbon tax is $70, rising annually at 1.5%. This policy raises all generations' welfare by almost 5%. However, doing so requires major intergenerational redistribution.

Затраты на поддержку инновационной деятельности в российских регионах в 2000-е гг. планомерно росли одновременно с сильной дифференциацией ее результатов. Внешнеэкономические санкции и ограничения по технологическому импорту придали актуальность исследованию факторов региональной изобретательской активности. Эмпирические работы в этой области подтвердили основные положения теоретической модели производственной функции знаний, определив ключевым фактором развития инноваций увеличение затрат на научные исследования.Как показано в статье, количество потенциально коммерциализируемых патентов в наибольшей степени зависит от качества человеческого капитала, производного от численности экономически активных горожан с высшим образованием (так называемый креативный класс). Значимым фактором выступают также затраты на приобретение оборудования вследствие его высокого износа и на фундаментальные исследования, закладывающие основу для новых разработок. Центр-периферийная структура российской инновационной системы способствует миграции высококвалифицированных исследователей в регионы-лидеры, ослабляя потенциал регионов-доноров. Вместе с тем ограничения на переток знаний в форме патентов существенно меньше, а потому близость к «центру» в этом случае рассматривается как положительный фактор.

For every nation, preservation of the people is the most important thing. For Russia this life-affirming task is as important as for no other power due to its specific features. We are talking about the key geopolitical task of our country, since Russia has 17% of the Earth's land. At the same time, Russia's share in the world economy at purchasing power parity is 3.1%, and the population of Russia today makes only 1.9% of the world's population. And a further reduction in the country's share of the world population is highly undesirable. To stop the decline in the population by 2025, and then begin a gradual recovery of its size, three main measures are needed. The first and most significant is reduction in mortality, which in Russia on average with the account of the age structure, is 30-40% higher than in developed countries and 20% higher than in post-socialist countries. The main thing here is to reduce mortality in working age, from cardiovascular diseases and external causes. The second most important thing is to ensure migration growth to Russia up to 250 thousand people per year. The third is to increase the total fertility rate from 1.5 in 2019 to 1.75-1.8 by 2030. It is impossible to improve the demographic indicators and restore the safety of the people in the conditions of crisis and stagnation. But it is impossible to move to socio-economic growth without raising income and consumption of the population. The main condition for preservation of the people is resumption of the socio-economic growth by 3-4% per year that will ensure growth in the real income of the population and final consumption of households, assistance to families with children in order to overcome poverty and, ultimately, an increase in the birth rate.

This article analyzes the ownership structure of state-owned companies and their role in the Russian economy. Using a sample of 114 of the largest Russian companies, we estimated direct and indirect state participation as a percentage of shareholdings for direct and indirect federal property during the time period of 2006–2014. We used two methods to estimate the role of state-owned enterprises (SOEs), which allowed us to compare our results with OECD and Rosstat statistics for a broader sample of Russian companies owned by the public sector. This study revealed a decline in SOEs’ share in the capitalization of the Russian stock market and a slight increase in their share of total revenues and employment. The results indicated that public SOEs demonstrated significantly higher productivity compared to non-public SOEs and private companies had a distinct advantage in productivity compared with public SOEs. Despite the significant advantages in productivity of private companies over the SOEs, over a 9-year period, we observed that this gap narrowed. This may be due to conditions of high financial volatility and stagnation of the economy that result in certain advantages for SOEs in terms of access to sources of long-term funding and other forms of state support. However, SOEs with indirect state control experienced a rapid growth in revenue and productivity compared to other firms. This may indicate the presence of a specific stock selection mechanism for transferring more effective SOEs from direct state ownership to indirect control as an alternative to privatization.

This study examines the influence of state participation in the ownership structure of companies on their financial efficiency using a sample of 114 largest companies in Russia. As an indirect indicator of efficiency, we used a variety of financial indicators: revenue per employee (gross margin), return on equity, profit margin and debt burden. The effects of direct and indirect state ownership are considered separately. Using econometric analysis, we conclude that the dominance of the block of shares owned by the state has a negative effect on the performance characteristics, and its increase is associated with an increase in the debt burden of the companies. According to our criteria, state-owned enterprises (SOEs) perform worse on average than private companies. The mechanism of how changes in the "real sector" affect profitability is examined parti cularly closely. The study shows that a change in the profitability of private companies is characterized by a significant dependence on the movement of labor productivity characteristics. At the same time, for SOEs, a similar correlation was not revealed. These companies demonstrated no visible relationship between their profitability and performance characteristics. The study shows that increases in the size of direct government ownership lead to lower labor productivity and profitability; the impact of indirect ownership is, seemingly, more complicated.

BACKGROUND: Research efforts to measure the concept of healthy ageing have been diverse and limited to specific populations. This diversity limits the potential to compare healthy ageing across countries and/or populations. In this study, we developed a novel measurement scale of healthy ageing using worldwide cohorts. METHODS: In the Ageing Trajectories of Health-Longitudinal Opportunities and Synergies (ATHLOS) project, data from 16 international cohorts were harmonized. Using ATHLOS data, an item response theory (IRT) model was used to develop a scale with 41 items related to health and functioning. Measurement heterogeneity due to intra-dataset specificities was detected, applying differential item functioning via a logistic regression framework. The model accounted for specificities in model parameters by introducing cohort-specific parameters that rescaled scores to the main scale, using an equating procedure. Final scores were estimated for all individuals and converted to T-scores with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 10. RESULTS: A common scale was created for 343 915 individuals above 18 years of age from 16 studies. The scale showed solid evidence of concurrent validity regarding various sociodemographic, life and health factors, and convergent validity with healthy life expectancy (r = 0.81) and gross domestic product (r = 0.58). Survival curves showed that the scale could also be predictive of mortality. CONCLUSIONS: The ATHLOS scale, due to its reliability and global representativeness, has the potential to contribute to worldwide research on healthy ageing.

В.И. Ананьин - старший преподаватель кафедры управления бизнес-процессами, Российская академия народного хозяйства и государственной службы при Президенте РФАдрес: 119571, г. Москва, проспект Вернадского, д. 82, стр. 1E-mail:v.ananiin@gmail.comК.В. Зимин - главный редактор журнала Information Management, член правления Российского союза ИТ-директоровАдрес: 123056, Москва, ул. Селезневская, д. 34E-mail: konst.zimin@gmail.comМ.И. Лугачев - доктор экономических наук, профессор, заведующий кафедрой экономической информатики, Московский государственный университет им. М.В. Ломоносова; Научный руководитель корпоративного университета группы компаний IBSАдрес: 119991, г. Москва, ГСП-1, Ленинские горы, д. 1, стр. 46E-mail:mlugachev@gmail.comР.Д. Гимранов - начальник управления информационных технологий, ОАО «Сургутнефтегаз»; заведующий базовой кафедрой ОАО «Сургутнефтегаз», Сургутский государственный университетАдрес: 628415, г. Сургут, ул. Григория Кукуевицкого, д. 1, корпус 1E-mail: gimranov_rd@mail.ruК.Г. Скрипкин - кандидат экономических наук, доцент кафедры экономической информатики, Московский государственный университет им. М.В. ЛомоносоваАдрес: 119991, г. Москва, ГСП-1, Ленинские горы, д. 1, стр. 46E-mail:k.skripkin@gmail.com В статье обсуждаются характерные изменения в практиках управления, появляющиеся в рамках цифровой трансформации бизнеса. Показаны взаимные связи этих изменений, а также связи с изменениями в организационной культуре организации. Среди новых практик управления рассмотрены практики управления, проявляющиеся как на уровне предприятия в целом (цифровые продукты, цифровые бизнес-модели, цифровое управление цепочками создания ценности, цифровые бизнес-процессы), так и на локальном уровне принятия управленческих решений – неограниченная информированность и управление предприятием в режиме реального времени (Real Time Enterprise). Показана необходимость формирования определенных культурных норм в организации, включая тотальное управление знаниями и ориентацию на быстрые изменения. Рассмотрены преемственность и качественные отличия традиционной автоматизации от цифровизации предприятий. Обсуждается возможность использования теорий и методов, связанных с таким понятием, как комплементарные активы, для исследования новых форм организации цифрового предприятия. В статье также представлена исследовательская программа, проводимая в рамках программы цифровой трансформации деятельности ОАО «Сургутнефтегаз» Орбита 2.0. В данной исследовательской программе делается акцент на анализ проблемы устойчивости организации. Для того, чтобы организация была гибкой и изменчивой, она должна периодически оказываться в состоянии неустойчивости. В противном случае в ней будет возникать сильное сопротивление изменениям. Поиск принципов и форм организации, обеспечивающих управляемость неустойчивыми организациями, является важным направлением этих исследований.