Services in Russia: past, present, and future

Foreign direct investment (FDI) can have a significant impact on economic development in developing economies like Russia. FDI can bring in capital, technology, and management expertise that can stimulate economic growth, increase employment, and improve productivity. In the case of Russia, FDI has played a vital role in the country’s economic development. A study conducted by the World Bank in 2019 found that FDI inflows have contributed significantly to Russia’s economic growth and led to increased productivity, employment, and exports. The article analyzes the relationship between foreign direct investment and economic growth in Russia using ARDL cointegration and Toda-Yamamoto causality analysis test. The results reveal that there is no causality relation between GDP growth and foreign direct investment inflow in Russia. Overall, foreign direct investment effectively contributes to economic growth in Russia in the short term and not really in the long run.

In this paper, we describe an approach to business processes and services which views work practices as recurrent patterns of communication called genres. Although defining work practices in this way is unorthodox, it provides two major advantages. First, the communication resources employed by the parties engaging in a service transaction can be clearly described, understood, and communicated. Business processes and services can be differentiated on the basis of the structural and functional arrangement of their constituent genres. This provides a view of a business process or service that is technology-independent. Second, using this approach means that work practices are defined contextually—an important consideration when trying to understand how business processes and services will influence organizations. Because genres are represented using directed graphs, prototypes can be developed to assist during the analysis of existing services and the design of new ones. Structural and functional change of genres can be used to reveal how a specific service is evolving within an organization. This enables us to determine if business demands have changed, something that is difficult to achieve using conventional service engineering approaches.

Structural decompositions of energy consumption between 1995 and 2009: Evidence from WIOD

This paper examines developments in market share, export structure and revealed comparative advantage within the EU and in comparison with other regions of the world. It pays special attention to shifts in specialisation and export structure with regard to manufacturing and services, lower and higher technology industries and business services. Data are taken from the World Input-Output Database (WIOD), which provides information on international production process linkages and allows calculation of measures of trade in value added.

This chapter deals with contemporary changes in the international division of labour. Subsequent sections of this chapter are devoted to a brief overview of the causes and scope of the globalisation of business services; reviewing the theory of offshoring with an emphasis on trends in the business services sector; identifying the mechanisms of upgrading in international value chains; and considering their impact on the international division of labour. The statistical illustrations of the trends draw on the world input-output database, specifically on IT and professional business services sectors in three popular offshoring locations: Central and Eastern Europe, India, and Ireland.

This paper presents the results of an analysis of the essence and content of customs services at border crossing points. Using statistical data and ranking information provided by the Bank of Russia and the World Bank, the necessity of improving the level of customs services in Russia is objectively demonstrated. A study of the basic level of methodological and methodical elaboration of the issue of improving customs services in the works of Russian scientists has been conducted. It is shown that a border crossing point is a key element ensuring the possibility of increasing the efficiency of customs services, since the technological operations performed in it within the framework of customs and other types of state control are key in terms of implementing actions that determine the duration and cost of customs services for participants in foreign economic activity.

David Evans: putting universal health coverage on the agenda

The purpose of this essay is to show how the United Nations system including the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and such specialized agencies as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), UNESCO, and the International Labour Organization (ILO), etc. has been incorporated into the international network of aid agencies and to discuss some of the consequences for host countries. Specifically the UN development system has been coopted into providing what is known as preinvestment which paves the way for investors of all kinds, generally foreign investors. Preinvestment is a kind of technical which consists of sending ''experts (generally from the specialized agencies) and equipment to a host country and financing fellowship trainees from the country. Preinvestment projects were designed especially to identify and prepare projects for investors, particularly the World Bank and other international financial institutions. In this way the UNDP joins the other agencies in financing the infrastructure necessary for further productive investment, public and private, local and foreign. I show how this occurs in Colombia by describing the country programing exercise of 1971. Country programing is the process by which the resident representative of UNDP and the host government agree upon a list of technical projects that UNDP will finance over a five-year period. Colombia provides an excellent case study. A prime example of an open or outward-looking economy, Colombia has been selected by many international aid agencies as a testing ground for their various programs. In 1948-1949 it was the first nation to be surveyed by an economic mission of the World Bank. In the 1960s it was one of the first four nations to have a consultative group organized by the World Bank. In 1969-1970 it was chosen to be a test case for comprehensive preinvestment planning by the Bank. In 1969 the ILO selected Colombia as the first nation to study under its World Employment Program (International Labour Organization, 1970). It hoped to convince the Colombian government to try ILO strategies for coping with employment problems. In 1971 Colombia became one of the original eighteen nations to undertake country programing with the UNDP. Colombia was also one of the original Latin American nations to receive assistance from the Alliance for Progress. According to the study prepared

Competing conceptualizations of decent work at the intersection of health, social and economic discourses

ABSTRACTThis article examines the role of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in promoting ‘financial inclusion’ in West Africa. The role of the ILO in microfinance and financial inclusion has often been overlooked, in contrast to the role played by the World Bank, G20 and like institutions. The ILO is significant here because it suggests a number of ambiguities and important political dynamics that have gone overlooked in previous critical discussions of microcredit, which have often focused on the politics of commercialisation, indebtedness and accumulation by dispossession. This article draws instead on Gramsci’s concepts of subalternity and organic crisis to suggest that the politics of ‘financial inclusion’ in practice are often shaped as much by the political dynamics engendered by the erosion of postcolonial order as by the imperatives of accumulation. The argument is illustrated empirically by examining ILO activities on microinsurance and ‘inclusive finance for workers’ in West Africa, with an emphasis on Senegal.

The paper provides a review of and presents some empirical evidence on the dynamics of knowledge, structural change and spatial concentration of economic activities, focusing on the case of business services (BS). It explores how the role of knowledge has evolved in relation to the dimensions of: (i) science, technology and structural change; (ii) the long‐term processes of tertiarization of the economy – in particular the growth of BS; (iii) the spatial concentration of BS as an outcome of the increasing volume and complexity of knowledge and the need to manage it through spatial proximity. Our arguments are supported by empirical evidence on the spatial concentration of BS in the European regions.

The breadth and scope of the COVID-19 pandemic took everyone by surprise. The world economy has experienced the largest contraction ever in modern times, estimated at 3.5 per cent in 2020 (World Bank, 2021). International trade declined by about 9 per cent in 2020, with trade in goods declining by about 6 per cent and trade in services by 16.5 per cent (UNCTAD, 2021a). Foreign investment fell to historical lows, with inflows declining 42 per cent. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), the working hours lost in 2020 were equivalent to 255 million full-time jobs, leading to $3.7 trillion in lost labour income (ILO, 2021).

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The sector of knowledge-intensive business services (KIBS) not only contributes to its own dynamic and innovative development but also to the development of the external environment through the creation, accumulation, and dissemination of knowledge. Therefore, it is considered one of the key pillars of the knowledge-based economy. This article addresses the problem of its spatial distribution in Russia. The basis of the study is uniquely empirical, obtained through a series of large-scale surveys among Russian producers and consumers of KIBS. The collected data provide quantitative evidence for the spatial dimension of the sector. Comparative analysis of the production and consumption of KIBS in Russia’s federal districts makes it possible to classify the latter in terms of the exchange of related services and mapping of the intensity of their interregional supply and demand across federal districts. It is established that companies offering KIBS in Russia are largely concentrated in big cities. The demand for KIBS is more distributed, but not spatially neutral. This paper may be of interest to researchers focusing on the spatial distribution of elements of the innovation-based economy in Russia. It is also relevant for regional authorities, because it can help them assess the development capacity of their regions.

The starting point for this article is the idea put forward by Gadrey (2008, 2010) that environmental problems and a policy of addressing them by introducing an environmental tax could trigger economic contraction and downscaling and a shrinking of the service sector in developed economies. The purpose of this article is to test these hypotheses using an evolutionary simulation model. To this end, we use a model of endogenous growth and structural change into which an environmental dimension is incorporated. The results of our simulations certainly reveal structural change within service industries but no change in the distribution of employment between services and manufacturing. Furthermore, we show that the environmentally desirable stagnation of labor productivity in the capital goods sector is compatible with a largely positive growth trend in the economy as a whole, with the development of knowledge-intensive business services apparently able partially to offset the stagnation of productivity in the capital goods sector. We conclude by emphasizing the need for environmental innovation in service activities and cast doubt on the long-term effectiveness of an environmental tax in the fight against pollution.