Research & Expertise news at HSE University

The widespread belief that wage increases in Russia outstrip growth in productivity is no more than a myth, Deputy Director of the HSE Centre for Labour Market Studies, Rostislav Kapelyushnikov claims in an article ‘Productivity and wages: a little simple arithmetic’. Besides, in recent years we have seen a fall in the cost of labour, particularly in industry.

People's lives today are more flexible, while individual biographies – even though they may look like 'games without rules' to an outsider – are in fact carefully designed around personal choices. These are the main themes of a paper by Sergey Zakharov and Ekaterina Mitrofanova published in the monograph Russia and China: Youth in the 21st Century. Although the paper focuses mainly on young Russians' reproductive behavior, its content goes beyond demographics and addresses certain existential aspects, such as non-stereotypical biographies of modern people and their diverse identities, values, ​​and desires.

On November 19-20, 2014 HSE hosted a conference on Global Governance: Nominal, Real and Alternative Structures. The conference was largely focused on the paradigm shift in geopolitical and geoeconomic structures of the modern world, as well as the underlying causes and long-term implications of such changes.

of all working poor Russians are either low-skilled or medium-skilled workers in blue-collar jobs. 

of construction companies are experiencing a shortage in graduates from educational institutions who have either technical training or who specialize in a trade.

of Russian workers are employed either completely or partially in the informal sector. 

Professor William Pyle from Middlebury Collage gave a seminar about research into Russia's business lobby. In 2014, together with Finnish economist Laura Solanko, he received the National Award for Applied Economics, which was established by organizations including the HSE.

Contemporary Russia’s political system is becoming more and more similar to the Chinese one, while the Chinese economy is demonstrating stable growth and the Russian one is stagnating.  Andrey Yakovlev , Professor at the HSE Department of Theory and Practice of Public Administration, believes that the Chinese were able to effectively use the methods of governance they adopted from the USSR. His paper ‘Incentives in the System of Public Administration and the Economic Growth’ was presented at the conference ‘Challenges for Economic Policy in the New Environment’.