The paper attempts to estimate the impact of skill-differentiated migration on longterm economic growth in 17 regions containing 165 countries. The author contructs a global CGE-OLG model with 100 overlapping generations calibrated based on the UN demographic projections up to 2100 specifying total population, age structure, migration flows and age distribution of migrants. The model accounts for data on skill distributions of locals and migrants as well as budgetary data, major pension system indicators and cash flows from fossil fuels extraction. These are factors altering long-term growth, labor productivity and tax burden. Estimates of migration contribution to GDP growth in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia outweigh those of adverse dynamics of fertility and mortality and reach 32.8, 26.3 and 63.5 percent of GDP respectively in 2100. The impact of migration on growth is divided into two channels: total population growth effect and skill distribution effect. It is shown that population growth has a positive influence on GDP while the skill distribution effect may be ambiguous depending on the direction that it takes the actual skill distribution relative to the optimal. For Russia, the predicted positive net migrant inflow generates a 7.7% GDP gain by 2100 due to total population increase. It also leads to an increase in the share of unskilled labor, which in turn brings the country closer to the optimal distribution of production factors, reduces the cost of unskilled labor and adds another 2.5% to the GDP. This is followed by a decline in welfare of low-skilled individuals and welfare gains for high-skilled labor. 

The global agenda recognizes the necessity to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for sustainable long-term development. In this regard, the strategic priorities of many countries in the field of energy are focused on renewable energy sources. At the current stage of development, the technological transition to renewable and clean energy requires the search for compromise solutions in the field of economic policy, including an understanding of the role of tax regulation. This paper examines how the use of renewable energy sources impacts the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), considering the domestic extraction of primary resources and innovative activity. Attention is also paid to the role of tax policy in the effectiveness of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The panel data of OECD countries (1991–2018) was analyzed, and the non-stationarity and the crosscorrelation across countries were demonstrated, as well as the presence of time series cointegration. The above requires the use of modern techniques in order to build CS-ARDL models (cross-section augmented autoregressive distributed lag modeling) to reliably estimate the short-term and long-term impact of the factors. These results support the hypothesis of the good contribution of renewable energy to the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as well as demonstrate its long-term positive impact. At the same time, a significant contribution is found in countries with stricter tax policies in the field of environmental protection. The obtained results are discussed in the conclusion section, and so are some recommendations for Russian economic policy. The present work may be useful within the scope of establishing research consensus in the area under consideration, and also prove to be of some methodological interest.

In this study, using online data on prices of retailers in Moscow, we analyzed the correspondence of price behavior to certain pricing models. The present study complements previous estimates of price rigidity in the context of identifying empirical signs of certain pricing models based on Russian data. The empirical analysis is based on data about Moscow online retailers collected on a daily basis from February 2019 to June 2020. The data cover 33 food categories, 54 non­food categories and seven service categories. The work obtained the following empirical results, which, with some degree of convention, may be inherent in the Russian economy as a whole. The work did not reveal an explicit dependence of the size of the price change on the duration of the period of price unchanged. The Golosov­Luсas model turned out to be the closest in terms of coincidence of stylized factors for Moscow online retailers in the studied time period, but no complete coincidence was found. Pricing behavior of Russian retailers refers to hybrid pricing models which include pricing elements that depend both on the state of the economy and on time. Decomposition of inflation into intensive (average size of price changes) and extensive (the share of goods whose prices have changed in a given period) components indicates a significant contribution of the intensive component to the price dynamics based on Russian data. A similar result is typical for inflation dispersion in which the contribution of the intensive component to the dispersion decomposition turns out to be the highest. The results obtained are not fully stable in relation to the period under consideration and can be adjusted as the sample expands.

This paper examines the structure of services exports in less developed economies. In more developed countries, complex services, such as maintenance and repair or information and communication technologies (ICT), and simple services, such as international tourism, both play an important role. However, in less developed economies, less complex sectors prevail. In the case of the latter, the sectoral structure is associated with a number of disadvantages. First, these sectors are predominantly exported on a regional rather than global scale, and second, as the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic shows, they are sensitive to particular global shocks. This does not imply that developing economies should invest less in these services, as the structure of production factors limits their ability to form viable alternatives. However, developing countries could pay more attention to those service industries that, on the one hand, do not require building a wide variety of complex and costly production ingredients such as innovation systems or large-scale production facilities and, on the other hand, provide more opportunities to export globally, create more high-quality jobs and are more resilient to global shocks. The ICT sector is used as an example of such an industry. This is not to suggest that the ICT sector can become a driving force of prosperity in the developing world; its effect is likely to be modest. Nevertheless, due to the specificities of the ICT sector, it might deliver many more success stories than a typical industrialization strategy.

Queues to a doctor have been a serious problem for the state healthcare system in Russia for a long time. In order to address this problem, the government has already been initiating various measures to reduce the waiting time for healthcare for ten years, regardless of the socioeconomic status of the patient. This article attempts to assess the dynamics of the typical waiting time for healthcare from 2011 to 2018 and the relationship between this indicator and the socioeconomic status of the patient. In case of a reduction of waiting time for a doctor, it is important that this effect spreads to all patients regardless of their socioeconomic status. In order to solve this problem we use the microlevel data of the Comprehensive Survey of Living Conditions of the Population, collected by the official statistics authorities, and analyze them using statistical and econometric tools. The results show that the average and median time to book a doctor visit and waiting time for a doctor in outpatient care institutions have been reduced. At the same time, in 2011, there was no significant relationship between waiting time for a doctor and the socioeconomic status of an individual, but from 2016 this relationship has emerged. In particular, people with higher education and a high level of income began to get to the doctor faster, ceteris paribus. Thus, despite the positive outcome of the healthcare reforms in terms of time spent on booking a visit and waiting for health services, not all population groups are equally likely to feel this effect. This fact shows the limited success of healthcare reforms in 2011–2018 and the need to simplify access to health services for all people, regardless of education and income.

The article presents an overview of the book “Poor Economics. A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty” by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Nobel Laureates in Economics 2019. The book’s Russian translation was prepared and published in 2021 by the Gaidar Institute Publishing House and Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences Saint Petersburg State University’s. The monograph summarizes the long-term experience of studying the economic practices of poor residents of a number of countries. It is emphasized that poverty and its companions—malnutrition, diseases, unemployment, etc.—are not exclusively a consequence of objective social, economic, historical, climatic and other conditions and restrictions, but also a result of how people and households act in these conditions, and what choices they make every day. Banerjee and Duflo propose five key conclusions concerning the origins of poverty and the causes of its sustainability: (1) the poor are often guided by false or outdated information, and, as a result, make irrational decisions; (2) the poor have to independently look for solutions to many life problems and manage various risks; (3) many of the effective “readymade solutions” are not known to the poor, and numerous financial services are too expensive for them; (4) the policy of helping the poor is often ineffective not because of any fundamental problems, but because of the inflexibility and priority of the process over the results; (5) pessimism and disbelief in the possibility of change can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies, both at the level of individuals and households, and at the state level. The observations of the Nobel Prize Laureates show how working solutions to the problems of the poor can be simpler and more accessible than the ones applied around the world without much success.