Empirical studies examining the impact of various aspects of digitalization on the socio-economic development of regional economies are relatively scarce in the Russian academic literature. Despite the growing role of digital technologies in regional economic development, their effects on key indicators of regional economic activity remain insufficiently explored. The aim of this study is to analyze the effect of one of the fastest-growing indicators of digitalization — e-commerce intensity — on the unemployment rate as well as on SME performance across Russia’s regions. Two indicators were employed to capture e-commerce intensity: the share of online sales in total retail turnover and the volume of online sales per capita in a region. By using panel data for Russian regions from 2014 to 2023 and applying econometric modeling techniques, statistically significant relationships were identified between the development of e-commerce and selected indicators of regional economic activity. First, there is a negative correlation between the share of online sales in total retail trade and the unemployment rate, which may indicate the potential of e-commerce to create jobs and expand employment. Second, a positive correlation emerged between per capita online sales and SME performance per capita and is indicative of an association between digital sales channels and SME activity. These findings should facilitate the formulation of regional economic policy by emphasizing the importance of developing digital infrastructure and supporting e-commerce as a significant factor in economic activity.
The structural transformation of the Russian labor market accelerated by digitalization, gig economy development, and external challenges makes the population search for new, more flexible forms of employment. Self-employment has become a key driver of these changes, yet its impact on real labor behavior strategies remains insufficiently studied. This article analyzes the diversification of labor strategies among Russia's self-employed and defines the role of the self-employment regime in adaptation to the modern labor market. The study uses a mixed methodology combining macro-statistics (Federal Tax Service, Rosstat), digital footprint analysis (Google Trends), and indepth content analysis with parsing of the largest Telegram community of self-employed (over 45K messages, 966 active users), linking macro-trends with micro-level motives. The resulting analysis empirically proves that self-employment is not a single strategy but a polymotivational adaptive module forming a continuum of behavioral practices. Value-based and psychological motives dominate: 44% expressed dissatisfaction with hired labor and 35% seek autonomy, indicating a proactive shift in labor consciousness. Simultaneously, forced macroeconomic and socio-demographic factors confirm self-employment as a critical social buffer. Extensive empirical material substantiates a mass transition to the portfolio career model — dynamic management of multiple projects and income sources. Self-employment in Russia has become a systemic institutionalized phenomenon driving employment diversification, not a marginal or temporary segment. The results challenge the view that the professional income tax serves merely as a fiscal tool and indicates a need to understand it as a factor shaping new labor behavior models. This requires the state to ensure regulatory stability that will reduce vulnerability among the new selfemployed category of workers.
This article analyzes how alcohol market regulations targeting vodka consumption in ways that do not impact prices affect various income groups in Russia. Its theoretical and empirical starting point consists of Russian and international studies that establish the role of restrictions on the time and conditions of alcohol sales, although they often omit the factor of price. The article’s innovative aspect lies in its comprehensive assessment of several non-price measures (morning, evening, and night time restrictions along with mandatory “dry days”) in combination with price instruments in order to provide a differentiated analysis of these measures by income level. The empirical data runs from 2011 to 2022. The Heckman instrumental variable model and the difference-in-differences method with Callaway and Sant’Anna estimates are used to account for selection and heterogeneity of effects. The results indicate that excessively strict morning restrictions (no sales before 2:00 PM) reduce vodka consumption only in below-average income groups, whereas limiting the start of sales to a more reasonable time (10:00 AM or 11:00 AM) affects all groups. Tightening evening restrictions significantly reduces consumption among low-income groups, but has little impact on affluent consumers. However, increasing the number of “dry days” has an ambiguous impact, which may indicate that demand is deferred or that these measures are intended primarily to limit alcohol consumption during holidays. The already confirmed correlations between vodka consumption and age, education, religious belief, marital status, and type of residence also appeared in this study. The overall conclusion is that temporarily limiting availability of alcohol, combined with targeted pricing instruments has the greatest potential to reduce harm among the most vulnerable segments of the population, while price-based interventions are most effective among the most affluent groups.
The number or proportion of independent directors is a key characteristic of corporate boards that is regulated in most jurisdictions. As a concept, independent directors have no relationship with the company other than board membership. In practice, independence is operationalized through regulatory criteria that determine who qualifies as an independent director. But to what extent do companies comply with these criteria? This paper assesses the scale of independent director misclassification in Russian companies, compares the characteristics of quasi-independent and truly independent directors, and examines the factors determining election of quasi-independent directors. The authors employed descriptive, statistical and econometric methods on a 20% stratified sample of Russian publicly traded companies from 2009 to 2020 (596 company-years). Nearly half of the directors designated as independent fail to meet key independence criteria (mainly due to ties with shareholders) and are in fact quasi-independent. Truly independent and quasi-independent directors differ significantly in gender, age and citizenship. The share of truly independent directors has been gradually increasing over time. The likelihood with which quasi-independent directors are appointed to boards is linked to corporate governance factors (e.g., ownership structure) and prior company performance. In particular, firms with poor return on assets (ROA) in the year preceding board elections tend to select quasi-independent board members. These findings should be useful for regulators, exchanges, and investors seeking to improve corporate governance and reliability of disclosures.
This paper utilizes nonlinear dynamics and complexity theory to analyze dynamic resilience of the Republic of Tajikistan from 2010 to 2025. Identification of tipping points in this study was carried out with nonlinear dynamics, which can detect Critical Slowing Down (CSD) signals before they manifest overtly in macroeconomic indicators. The authors reconstructed the phase change of Takikstan's economy based on Takens' Theorem with inputs from cyclical components of GDP data and industrial production indices. Particular emphasis was placed on the analysis of CSD indicators, such as autocorrelation and time-series variance. The study mathematically verified a phase change of the macrosystem that occurred in 2019. Priorto 2018, the economyexhibited "fragile" equilibrium characterized by high autocorrelation coefficients (alpha= 0.89) accompanied by a loss of resilience. The commissioning of the first units of the Rogun Hydropower Plant was identified as a change in the control parameter (an order parameter according to Haken), which triggered bifurcation and the system's transition into a new "high-energy" source of attraction. The authors have provided econometric evidence that Tajikistan's current leadership in industrial growth rates within the CIS (reaching a record 22.1% in 2025) and stable economic growth of 8.4% are not short-term outliers, but rather direct consequences of the formation of a new stable industrial-type attractor. The predictive toolkit developed here can be utilized by government authorities for monitoring systemic risks and preemptively mitigating macroeconomic instability when implementing national development strategies and medium-term development programs for the Republic of Tajikistan.
As the debt burden of Russian businesses continues to increase steadily, the need to stimulate corporate capitalization and discourage the use of debt financing for tax optimization purposes has become increasingly urgent. Based on data from annual accounting and financial statements of organizations provided by the Federal Tax Service of Russia, this article presents the first comprehensive assessment of the tax consequences of limiting interest expense deductibility for both the Russian economy and across individual industries. The study proposes models for assessing the fiscal effects of limiting interest expenses as a proportion of both EBITDA and EBIT and concludes that limiting interest deductibility to 30% of EBITDA would increase state tax revenues by approximately 330-583 billion rubles (excluding financial and insurance sectors). This change in policy would affect only the relatively small proportion of companies (approximately 0.3-0.5%) with high levels of debt and would help in curbing erosion of the tax base when firms shift profit to jurisdictions with lower corporate income tax rates. It would also indirectly stimulate corporate capitalization by constraining excessive leverage. In comparison, capping interest deductions at 30% of EBIT would affect about twice as many companies and could negatively impact the economy, as it would affect firms with only moderate or “normal” interest expenditures. Sectoral analysis reveals that the primary tax burden from either approach would fall on wholesale and retail trade, manufacturing, transportation, and storage industries. Extractive industries, real estate operations, and information and communications sectors would experience only a moderate increase in tax burden, and such interest deduction restrictions would have minimal impact on organizations in other economic sectors. However, the relatively small number of companies affected by these rules in less debt-dependent sectors would nevertheless bear a significantly higher tax burden, which could materially influence their investment behavior and financial strategies, particularly in industries traditionally reliant on debt financing for growth and operations.
Due to the unstable economic situation in Russia, it is imperative to identify the factors that determine the output of an enterprise (in particular, it is important for small and medium enterprises) and also to acknowledge that the parameters of the production function (i.e., return on factors of production, labor and capital) for Russian enterprises depend on the region. The scope of this study was limited to small and medium-sized Russian enterprises, and the parameters of the translog production function for them were arrived at using hierarchical models. The econometric calculations were based on data from 25,000 enterprises across 66 regions and 14 industrial groups from 2019 to 2020. (The sample consisted of companies that published financial statements for 2019 and 2020 in regions where at least 30 companies were also included.) The findings indicated that, in the first year of COVID-19 in Russia, the elasticity of output by capital did not change significantly, while the elasticity of labor increased. The hypothesis that labor elasticity of output is less in Moscow and St. Petersburg compared to other regions because those two cities have an oversupply of labor was confirmed. The related hypothesis that regions with high capital elasticity have less labor elasticity was also corroborated. In Russia’s eastern regions, in Siberia and the Far East, capital output elasticity was less from 2019 to 2020 because transport and business infrastructure were relatively undeveloped.
Demand for cash increases during crises and thus places additional strain on the payment infrastructure. Clustering the regions of the Russian Federation will facilitate differentiated response scenarios to shocks and improve forecasting tools that are responsive to specific regional characteristics. This article clusters Russian regions on the basis of the dynamics of their cash inflows and outflows. By applying correlation clustering analysis, Ward s method, and the K-Means algorithm, the authors identified groups of Russia s constituent regions with similar cash circulation patterns. For most denominations, the Elbow Method resulted in an optimal division into three clusters, whose boundaries varied with the volatility of operations. Most Russian regions exhibit similar dynamics in cash transactions for the most common denominations in circulation (5,000, 1,000, and 500 rubles). Major exogenous shocks tend to make regional patterns in the use of various cash denominations uniform. The formation of dominant clusters indicates that nationwide factors (such as changes in consumer behavior, adaptation to uncertainty, and unified economic policies) prevail over regional specifics in the dynamics of cash circulation. The results of the study have practical applications for the Bank of Russia and other financial institutions in their effort to transition to territorially oriented forecasting of cash demand with consequent opportunities to optimize logistical processes and minimize costs. The methodology proposed by the authors potentially has a broader scope, as it can be adapted to analyze other macroeconomic indicators.
The article examines the grounds for adjusting state policy and corporate strategies in order to adapt to external shocks while avoiding structural and institutional traps (SITs) as Russia pursues technological leadership. Its purpose is to elucidate the adjustment of government policy and corporate strategies for adapting to external shocks and overcoming structural and institutional traps that may undermine Russia’s technological progress and also to consider how structural factors in regional development may affect that progress. The research employed a three-component approach combining qualitative analysis of corporate reports and cases, econometric modeling, and comparison of adaptation models. Structural and dynamic analysis was applied based on an assessment of the volume, structure, dynamics, and actual financing of national technological projects. Dysfunctions and the limited effectiveness of universal state support measures were examined. The significant impact of the quantifiable structural characteristics of regions on innovation was confirmed. Qualitative analysis indicated that the waves of business adaptation (import substitution, restructuring, new technologies) have been thwarted by specific SITs that correspond to the typology of them developed by the author. The innovative aspect of this research lies in developing the concept of institutional traps through the introduction and quantitative operationalization of SITs for the analysis of macro- and mesoeconomic processes, as well as in the empirical identification of the dual role of commodity dependence as a financial resource of adaptation and also a source of structural risks. Another special feature of this study is its examination of the strategies of the largest Russian companies and consideration of innovative processes in the context of the structural characteristics of regional development. Overcoming SITs requires differentiated support measures based on the diagnosis of structural constraints in the economy. The conclusions reached can be used to adjust tax incentives and government programs and to develop targeted measures aimed at overcoming structural and institutional barriers to development.
This paper examines the role of dynamic commissions for ride-hailing platforms and finds they are a crucial pricing mechanism that directly balances the interests of passengers, drivers, and the platform itself. Dynamic commissions are a part of the ride-hailing platforms’ pricing used to balance supply and demand when trip intensity fluctuates and spatial distribution of demand is uneven. The objective of this paper is to analyze the advantages and limitations of dynamic commissions compared to fixed ones and to understand how dynamic commissions affect the resilience of platform markets and their ability to adapt to evolving market conditions. The methodology employed theoretical modeling of market equilibria in ride-hailing markets and was subjected to empirical verification using publicly available data. This approach provided a comprehensive evaluation of various strategies for managing commissions. The findings demonstrate that flexible commissions enhance platform adaptability to market fluctuations, reduce matching failures, increase driver earnings, and ultimately improve quality of service for passengers. Conversely, fixed commissions constrain a platform’s ability to maintain market equilibrium and result in decreased profitability, deterioration of service, and reduction in social benefit from it. These findings have significant implications for regulatory frameworks governing digital platforms in passenger transportation markets. The study underscores the necessity of adopting a hybrid approach to commission management that accommodates the interests of all stakeholders and promotes sustainable development within platform markets.
The article examines the work of the Russian academic Konstantin Gattenberger, a figure little known to modern students of the history of economics. Although Gattenberger was an original thinker, he was one of those theorists who fail to achieve fame in their profession. Nevertheless, he can rightfully be considered an innovator in various branches of economics and was ahead of his time on a number of points. In particular, Gatttenberger’s work in methodology engaged with the German historical school in what became known as the “dispute about methods.” Carl Menger’s famous article on this issue was published only two years later. Gattenberger also held original views on other methodological issues. In addition, he was the first economist to formulate the principle of the bank (deposit) multiplier and to show how it functioned. His theory of the cyclical development of the economy is still of interest, as is his way of defining an economic crisis, which differed from the generally accepted view.
The authortakes Mehran Gul's monograph, The New Geography of Innovation: The Global Contest for Breakthrough Technologies, as a point of departure to analyze the approaches Gul recommends for supporting unicorn companies as well asthe scientific ideas behind hisfavored policies. Gul introduces the concept of the "emoji economy" - a new stage in the development of global innovation hubs, such as Silicon Valley in the United States, the Yangtze Delta in China, and London in the UK, where an environment of trust, support, creativity, and self-realization may be represented symbolically as a smiling face. In the new technology race and especially in pursuit of artificial intelligence, the winners will be those countries and regions that can create such hubs of unicorns by means of a favorable business climate, a culture of creativity, abundant human capital, and an effective innovation system, including supporting infrastructure and access to financing. Thus, the success of Silicon Valley in California was ensured by a combination of the favorable conditions of the southwest coast of the United States, the concentration of expertise and infrastructure at a research university (Stanford), an influx of students and creative professionals from around the world, government funding for scientific research including for defense, and the commercialization facilitated by a stream of government contracts, venture capital investment and the startups it supported. This ensured that the United States took the lead in creating new technologies. Nevertheless, the prevalence of digital monopolies, the high cost of living, and the toxic corporate culture of California offer an opportunity to new competing clusters in China, Europe, South Korea, and Singapore. In the next stage, success will depend less on the quality of research and inventions than on the ability to translate scientific ideas into sought-after products and services. Constructive entrepreneurship will be crucial in creating durable companies with high growth potential from scratch and then facilitating their long-term development. This means that emoji economy hubs are competing globally for that kind of entrepreneur, for their firms, and for highly skilled professionals. This line of thinking from Gul's book has underpinned the author's recommendations for Russia as the country heads toward its persistent goal of achieving technological leadership.
This article examines exclusionary clauses applied across networks in multi-sided markets and focuses on how revenue-sharing agreements between different types of application developers and mobile device manufacturers impact competition and consumer welfare. The study examines why incumbent market players resort to exclusionary contracts and how the competition policies applied affect the welfare of users, mobile device manufacturers, and application developers. Using a game theory model, the author shows that excluding a newcomer's application prior to installation reduces welfare when users must incur costs to install the newcomer's app. An incumbent developer's motive in seeking an exclusionary contract lies in the additional profits accrued by monopolizing the digital advertising market through control of the flow of users' personal data. These profits enable incumbents to compensate manufacturers for blocking the installation by default of a newcomer's application. A key finding from the model is that market structure is determined not by users and advertisers, whose interaction via applications creates value, but by application developers and mobile device manufacturers, who are intermediaries in the interaction between users and advertisers. The model compares the policy of prohibiting exclusionary contracts when they negatively affect consumer welfare with the policy of a choice screen, which allows users to select independently the apps they would like to use when they first launch their mobile device. The choice screen policy is preferable because its implementation removes the incentive for established developers to pursue alternative methods of blocking new entrants to the market.
The study evaluates the impact of government support on the creation of small and medium-sized businesses in relation to regional differentiation in exposure to risks from sanctions. Overthree million instances of support provided to small and medium-sized businesses were analyzed. Cross-correlation was employed to ascertain the interval between introduction of state financial and advisory support and the emergence of significant positive effects on formation of new businesses. This analysis indicated that the relationship between government support for small and medium-sized businesses and the creation of new firms is not immediate and diminishes over time; however, the correlation is strongest within a two-to-four-month timeframe. Fixed-effects models were constructed to assess the impact of financial and advisory support on the number of newly created small and medium-sized businesses across regions with varying levels of risk from sanctions. Regression analysis revealed that both financial and advisory support have their most pronounced positive effects on the formation of small and medium-sized businesses in regions with moderate sanction risk. In high-risk regions, significant effects from financial support appears only after two months, while advisory support shows its impact after four months. No significant effects were observed in regions with low sanction risk. The authors offer practical recommendations based on these findings in order to inform the design of policies for fostering the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises and facilitating their transition into "higher" business categories.
This paper presents a methodology for assessing income inequality based on data from Rosstat's Statistical Survey of Population Income and Participation in Social Programs (SSIPSP) and tax data at the regional level. The income figures from paid employment for the highest income regional groups in the survey are replaced with the average income for those income groups from tax data. SSIPSP data are adjusted by the tax data within each region. Income adjustments can be applied without dividing the sample into regional subsets, but in this case the uppermost incomes are adjusted in accordance with the overall tax data distribution. To reconcile the sizes of groups of income recipients in the SSIPSP and tax data, an interpolation of tabulated tax data is applied based on a generalized Pareto curves approach. After personal income from paid employment is adjusted, the adjusted total household income and per capita income to be used for assessing income inequality can be derived. The paper presents comparisons of income inequality obtained from the empirical survey data, as well as from the adjusted survey data based on tax reporting at the national and regional levels. The regional adjustments ensure more accurate measures of both national and regional income inequality. This advantage is due to taking territorial differences in income into account by replacing the highest incomes reported in the survey by the average values from the tax data within each region.
From 2020 and 2021 to the present, the total fertility rate has resumed its decline in many developed countries, even those with the most developed support for families with children. This is due in part to economic crises (stagnant incomes against a backdrop of rising consumer standards and expectations, a global decline in housing affordability, etc.) and also to socio-cultural shifts (the effects of social media, the spread of "intensive parenting," the increasing difficulty of balancing parenthood and employment while maternal duties are mostly undiminished, etc.). Most developed and many developing countries pursue demographic policies, which may be explicitly codified in legislation or implemented through separate measures. The authors examine this common fertility support with an emphasis on its transformation over the past decade and then assess the effectiveness of such measures based on a pool of international studies. The article also addresses what directions these policies may take in the new phase of sustained decline in fertility. A review of studies on fertility support measures indicates that a combined approach encompassing multiple areas has the greatest effect. However, policy consistency and a country's economic, social, historical, and cultural context are extremely important. Support measures have a greater impact on the timing of births than on the final number of children. One reason for this is the rapidly changing social and economic conditions, as well as significant shifts in cultural values, that are occurring during the lifetime of the current generation.
The von Neumann model is one of the simplest ways to assess the maximum possible rate of sustainable economic growth. Although the dynamics it predicts are unstable and prone to strong oscillations (and also yield socially unacceptable equilibria) calculating g, using the von Neumann model to determine the maximum possible rates of long-term sustainable economic expansion can serve as a guide in setting goals for a country's economic policy. How to apply such a model in practical calculation of growth rates g has long been studied, but few empirical results concerning its use for macroeconomics or any similar topic with spectral properties in multi-sector models have appeared to date, either in Russia or elsewhere. Hence, this study offers a systematic empirical assessment of growth rates gfor Russia and several neighboring countries over the past three decades. Calculations were carried out both for the "classical" version of the model and for its "extended" version, which takes capital and labor into account as resources both produced and consumed. National sources of official statistics from SUTs and IOTs were used for calibration, and the calculations themselves were carried out at different levels of aggregation in order to assess the stability of the results obtained. The non-standard assumption used here, that labor is a commodity produced as needed, is quite evident in countries with an open but extremely strict migration policy, such as the oil monarchies of the Persian Gulf. The resultant growth rates turned out to be generally realistic and stable in dynamics even when aggregations are changed. Comparative analysis across countries indicated that the Russian economy in most years had potential growth rates comparable to those of Kazakhstan and China, especially in the "extended" model in which they held at about 17% for many years.
This article examines the current status of Russian non-profit organizations (NPOs) that hold endowed capital, including endowment funds, from the viewpoint of accounting and regulation. The study employed an algorithm for identifying endowmentfunds and NPOs holding endowments based on public financial reporting. This method selected for NPOs according to their OKOPF and OKVED codes (standardized categories of corporate legal status and operational scope) along with certain balance sheet line items (1320, 1260, 1550), ranked them by amount of capital, and analyzed how they align with international endowment regulations in the US, UK, Germany, and France. Data from 2018 to 2022 turned up 209 endowment funds and over a thousand NPOs holding endowments, of which over 70% manage their capital via trusts. The vast majority of endowment funds initially have over three million rubles, an amount which makes state subsidies to "top up" capital to the required minimum questionable. A review of studies on endowments held by NPOs shows that transparency and donations are positively correlated; funds that disclose the most information attract approximately 40% more donations. Comparing foreign and Russian approaches confirms that conservative investment strategies, mandatory single-company management, and minimum capital requirements limitthe sector's growth and receipts of income. The authors therefore propose abolishing the fixed threshold for endowment capital, expanding investment instruments, and enhancing transparency regarding capital and income by adding supplementary lines to standardized NPO reporting. This paper also establishes a methodological foundation for subsequent quantitative assessments of endowment fund and
The paper provides a quantitative assessment of grain damper effects on the Russian wheat market from 2021 to 2024. The author's analysis of the theoretical foundations for modeling the market of an exporting country yielded the following: (1) a proposed approach to modeling the demand for intermediate goods in the domestic market of an exporting country; (2) a description of the way in which export prices, duties, and domestic prices are related when there is a wholesale link in the chain of the exported goods. A simulation model of the Russian wheat market with constant elasticity coefficients was constructed. The positive effect of damping from 2021 to 2024 was as follows: (1) the coefficient of price variation decreased by 2.5-5.0% from 2021 to 2023; (2) domestic demand increased by 10.4 million tons; (3) agricultural inventories decreased by 9-19%; (4) budget revenues increased by 687 billion rubles. Negative effects included: (1) a decrease in exports by 12.2 million tons; (2) a decrease in producer revenues by 200 billion rubles and of the marginal income of exporters by 369.7 billion rubles; (3) a decrease in gross yields by 8.1 million tons. A long-term reduction in the regulatory impact of export duties on the market was observed because carryover inventories diminished. The study concludes that it is advisable to remove export duties on wheat by gradually increasing the base prices on which they are calculated.
The challenges in the Russian economy due to the labor market can have multidirectional effects on investment. A stimulus to investment might come from the adoption of labor-saving technologies and the resulting substitution of capital for labor. However, a constraint might be imposed by inability to hire labor to operate the newly acquired equipment. This paper presents a study of the impact of labor shortages on the investments made by enterprises in Russia as revealed in regular surveys of non-financial organizations conducted by the Central Bank of Russia. This analysis indicates that a diminishing labor supply is a factor that is increasing investment in the Russian economy. That this result is robust across different equations, evaluation methods, and initial datasets suggests that the investments are labor-saving in nature and supports the conclusion that capital is being substituted for labor. This effect is observed across all federal administrative districts and is most prevalent at industrial and trade enterprises, as well as at large and medium-sized businesses. The importance of labor shortages for investment in Russian businesses trended upward from 2019 to 2023. The need to compensate for lack of additional labor by increasing capital intensity in order to boost production volumes largely explains the low sensitivity of business investment to foreign exchange and monetary policy shocks and even to risk in general. The article's findings suggest that inflationary pressure from the labor market will potentially subside in the medium and long term even as demographic trends continue to be negative.
