The sanctions imposed on Russian foreign trade in 2022 led to a large-scale reorientation of exports toward neutral countries. This need to find new sales markets has increased the use of the existing ways to support non-resource exports and prompted calls to improve them and adapt them to address new conditions. The evidence of strain on various types of export support highlights the importance of assessing their effectiveness and ultimately optimizing them and refining how they are targeted. To that end, the article uses firm-level data for 2015 through 2019 to assess the impact of supports for non-resource exporters on diversification across products and countries and on export volumes of Russian companies. To minimize bias caused by firms self-selection into the group of support recipients, the study employs a wide range of control variables to construct a model for the probability that a firm is receiving support for its exports. The predicted values from this model are then used for propensity score matching and for comparing the dynamics of export activity among comparable firms. The results indicate that, in the year following a company’s request for export support, foreign market deliveries increase by an average of twelve percentage points. This growth is driven primarily by geographic expansion of exports and by broadening product ranges rather than by export intensity. A conservative estimate puts the value of increased exports from non-resource export supports at USD 1.4 billion in 2019. 

The article presents an econometric test of the expectations hypothesis for the Russian federal bond market before and after the global financial crisis, as well as in response to the transition to inflation targeting and the introduction of severe sanctions and restrictions on capital flows in 2022. The degree of correlation between current long-term interest rates and investor expectations of future short-term rates was arrived at by using seemingly unrelated regression equations (SURE), and the amount of co-directionality in the movement of long-term and future short-term interest rates was also determined. The relationship between expected values for the short-term interest rate and the long end of the yield curve is not uniform across various shorter terms. On average, future interest rates change in the same direction as the slope of the yield curve, i. e. forward rates contain some information about future changes in yields to maturity. This suggests that there is potential for the authorities to employ the term structure of interest rates as a guide to the expectations of market participants. When the coefficients are derived during episodes of economic crisis, their values indicate that market participants significantly underestimate the risk that inflation may accelerate and that monetary policy will be tightened. The reaction at the long end of the yield curve after the transition to inflation targeting indicates that expectations for the key rate in the long run are stable and that market participants remain confident about effective regulation and regard it as able to reduce and stabilize inflation in the long run.

The paper explores how the focus of Russian startups on investment in sustainable development technologies affects their attractiveness to venture capital investors. Venture capital plays a significant role in financing rapidly growing companies as they develop new technologies and thereby supports industries that drive economic growth. However, venture capital activity in recent years has been flagging both globally and in Russia. Sustainable development technologies mitigate environmental and social risks in the economy and in society and have been increasingly attractive to investors since the mid-2000s. The article analyzes to what extent sustainable development technologies may appeal to venture capital investors in the Russian market despite the current turbulent environment. The study used panel regression analysis of 850 venture capital deals concluded between 2018 and 2024 and found a significant relationship between a company’s focus on sustainable technologies and the amount of venture capital it raised. There was also a positive correlation with the probability of securing subsequent rounds of funding, which was also influenced by the age of the portfolio company. These findings show that mature companies can better integrate ESG principles and therefore become more attractive investments for venture capital. The study also indicated that syndicated investor participation in deals and the degree of innovation in the technology developed by a company had a positive impact on attractiveness to venture capital. The article is one of the first quantitative studies to explore the relationship between a company’s concentration on sustainable development technologies and the attention it receives from venture capital investors. As such, its findings may be of interest to researchers studying both sustainable development and venture capital, and they can also be utilized to enhance Russia’s venture capital market.

Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin and XRP are among the largest cryptocurrencies and together have a market capitalization that constitutes a substantial portion of the digital asset market. At the same time, the cryptocurrency market differs from that of traditional financial assets because it has greater price volatility, which makes constructing more accurate forecasts of daily volatility for these assets especially useful. A more accurate estimate of the daily volatility of a financial asset is an important aspect of trading strategies and arriving at a risk management stance. Volatility forecasts are also a factor in the regulatory policy that financial authorities pursue for the digital asset market. The study collects supplementary non-financial information from the internet and feeds it into an HAR-RV model to improve the accuracy of realized volatility forecasts for the four largest cryptocurrencies. Variables are then derived from GDELT and Google Trends data sources as exogenous indicators of public interest and sentiment. These variables are incorporated into a standard HAR-log-RV model, and various versions of the model for each asset are applied to a moving window from 1 January 2018 to 23 June 2024 to yield more than 2,000 out-of-sample one-day-ahead forecasts on which loss functions are calculated. The set of out-of-sample model errors for each asset is tested using the MCS procedure to select the set of statistically superior forecast models. The data sources proposed in the study and the variables constructed from them significantly improve realized volatility forecasts for the four largest cryptocurrencies.

A well-developed system of vocational education and training (VET) is a prerequisite for sustainable economic growth, and it is becoming even more important because of technological and structural changes in the Russian economy, labor shortages, and a persistent imbalance between the supply and demand for labor. The article employs the Labor Force Survey to analyze various types of workbased VET. Although the average percentage of workers who have completed vocational education (27.1% in 2023) is comparable to that of European countries, VET in Russia is mostly limited to training in occupational safety and health. Other kinds of instruction, such as short-term courses and trainings, professional development and retraining programs, and the study of new technologies, are much less common and reach no more than 11% of workers. The number of participants in VET and the training they undergo vary considerably from one industry or occupation to another. Occupational safety and health training is nearly the only kind provided in manufacturing industries for both skilled and unskilled workers. The other types of VET are most common in industries that require more intellectual skills (education, healthcare, finance and insurance, information and communications, professional and scientific employment) and among specialists. The main determinants of participation in VET revealed by applying logit regression are occupational and industry factors along with the nature of labor relations. Restricting vocational training to occupational safety and health (especially for manual labor) coupled with a paucity of other training aimed at the renewal of skills and acquisition of new competencies may hinder Russia in its attempt to advance the technical and technological modernization of its economy, overcome its labor shortage, and increase labor productivity. Those goals require reforms in the way continuing occupational education is carried out.

The article examines how personnel shortages and the involvement of less competitive groups of workers affect Russia’s labor market. The theoretical section argues that the current skills shortage is due to a severe deficit of the required competencies among job seekers and that this is now becoming a socio-structural issue. Although in-demand competencies are lacking in the economy, many job seekers cannot find work. The elderly, youth, and women face the greatest challenges because their knowledge, skills, and capabilities deviate the most from the needs of the labor market. The second section of the article provides an empirical analysis of the diverse competencies of adults based on their group affiliation. This kind of assessment has been made possible by access to new sources of information and processing methods in the study. The article presents the author’s conceptual framework and methodology as well as the results of studying textual data from job postings and resumeś  collected from the online job search platforms Headhunter, Zarplata.ru, and Rabota v Rossii from 2019 to 2023. A comprehensive (multi-layered) competency taxonomy and aggregated competency groups have been generated based on the documents collected that specify job requirements and the skills and knowledge described in resumes. The results of a statistical analysis indicate that the value of individual competencies in the Russian labor market may be assigned to three conceptual categories (elite, moderate, and economical). The analysis detected gender and age differences in the acquisition of these competencies by specific groups of job seekers. Another (unplanned) research result was the identification of several significant factors in the current increase in worker competency. Among the most significant of these at present are: lifelong accumulation of skills at work; obsolescence of individual skills; renewal of skills (or valorization of those that have been in low demand for a long time); complexity and simplicity in mastering skills (which segregates groups of employees); and favorable opportunities for job seekers to improve their skills.

Non-financial reporting now occupies a place alongside financial reporting itself as one of the most important documentary sources of information available to a wide range of stakeholders such as investors, clients, and community organizations. They can utilize information from non-financial reports to make business decisions based not only on financial and economic criteria of effectiveness but also on evaluations of sustainability and corporate responsibility. This article analyzes the way non-financial information was disclosed by Russian companies in 2023 especially in relation to current geopolitical circumstances. The study involved a thorough examination of the non-financial reports of nineteen Russian companies in which they highlighted their social initiatives, such as humanitarian assistance to participants in the special military operation, support for civilians affected by military actions, swift introduction of import substitution programs, and other measures that address contemporary challenges and societal concerns. A comparison was also made with the non-financial reports of the same companies for 2020, a year in which the public focus was on ameliorating the COVID-19 pandemic and limiting its repercussions. The results indicate that there has been a significant qualitative improvement in non-financial reporting for 2023 compared to 2020. The scope of that progress underscores persistent deficiencies in Russia’s national institutional environment and demonstrates an urgent need for developing methodological approaches and regulatory mechanisms within the national business reporting system. Such improvements are crucial for enhancing the transparency and accuracy of non-financial disclosure in order to ensure that it addresses societal demands and expectations.