Неэргодическая экономика

The study tests the hypothesis that Russia’s transition from flat to progressive income taxation will produce revenue that would be sufficient for the advancement of high–tech industries. To test this hypothesis, we considered two scenarios of the reform – the two–tiered system, which has been implemented since 2021, and the project of a four–tiered system proposed by the Liberal Democratic Party. To estimate the effects of the tax reform, we calculated the revenues from taxing high–income taxpayer groups and subgroups at specific tax rates. As a result, it was found that the reform could produce 187 billion roubles in extra revenue, which means that there is a vast discrepancy between the calculated estimates and the government’s expectations (60 billion roubles). In other words, the Russian government significantly underestimates the potential of the income tax. According to the second scenario, which aims to build a more sophisticated income tax system, the revenue would be 1.1 trillion roubles. Thus, a well–designed scale of the personal income tax will enable the government to considerably enhance this tool’s fiscal efficiency. The calculations of the extra revenue generated by the reform relied on the statistics of the World Inequality Database (WID) for 2019. To test the relevance of the input and output data, we conducted a comparative analysis at the micro–level by looking at the wage levels in Russian, American and European space corporations. We found that the micro–economic data are closer to the WID statistics rather than to Rosstat, which confirmed the accuracy of our results. Our calculations have confirmed the general hypothesis and showed that the extra revenue from the reform will enable the government to fully modernize microelectronics and the geothermal industry in Russia.

The paper considers the influence of megatrends, currently acting as drivers of changes taking place in society, on the structure of the emerging economy of post–industrial society. Under their influence, a new economy is formed, focused on the use of such a resource as time, the amount of which, available to people, is increasing as robotomics develops. The research is based on the study of five global trends in the development of modern society: demographic transformations; natural resources depletion and climate change; changing geo–economic and geopolitical landscapes; digitalization and development of new technologies; comprehensive human welfare: wealth, health and knowledge. The article proves that these trends seriously challenge the future of humanity and fundamentally change the structure of the economy and employment. The response to the megatrends challenges is the formation of new directions in the economic structure that help to respond to them and deal with their negative implications. We establish that megatrends have contributed to the development of such areas as silver economy, circular economy, robotomics, peer–to–peer economy, and laid the foundation of a spiritual and moral economy and leisure economy. The work concludes that there are prerequisites in society for the transition to the economy, in which social effects will prevail over economic ones. High level of technology development and digitalization help to make such a transition to an “economics with a human face”. The formulated principles of adaptation to the emerging economy enable countries to develop a transition strategy with minimal social and economic costs. The novelty of the research consists in comparing megatrends with changes occurring in the structure of the economy and the labor market, as well as in substantiating social orientation of the post–industrial economy, which is formed under the influence of global trends in social development.

The article considers the results of the third wave of identification of world–class universities in 2021, obtained on the basis of the authors’ methodology. The comparison of the new results with the data for the 2017 and 2019 allowed us to examine in more detail some well–established mental stereotypes of a geopolitical and national character. In particular, the role of the North American university center is declining, but the universities of the United States and Canada are still models for the rest of the world, both in terms of the breadth of scientific diversification and in terms of the research results obtained. The seemingly self-evident “decline of Europe” concerning the market of advanced universities is not confirmed. Moreover, there is reason to talk about the growing activity of the European geopolitical center, whose universities not only hold their positions but also rapidly increase the number of highly specialized institutions and are at the forefront of training personnel for post–industrial society. Contrary to many expectations, the Asian university market is still far from becoming a distinctive authentic phenomenon and is still only an example of a relatively successful "copying model" of Western models. Quite unexpected was the alarming conclusion about the superiority of advanced universities in Latin America over universities in the post–soviet space in general and in Russia in particular.

The subject of this study is the innovation market. To understand the laws of its functioning, this article introduces the concept of a technology frontier. This is understood as the relative productivity of labor (relative to the technological leader – the United States), the achievement of which makes it justified for developing economies to move from large–scale borrowing of foreign new technologies to their development within the country. The purpose of the article is to determine the specified frontier, for which a simple econometric model based on international statistics for 61 countries is proposed. The modeling methodology extends Schumpeterian ideas about two innovative stages: the creation and dissemination of technologies. The technology frontier is interpreted as the point of intersection of the curve of specific costs for the purchase of technologies abroad with the curve of costs for their development and creation within the country. It is assumed that both types of costs depend upon the relative labor productivity. The share of R&D costs in GDP was used as a proxy variable for technology creation costs and the ratio of the balance of payments for intellectual property to GDP was used as a proxy variable for borrowing costs. To improve the accuracy of the calculations, countries were clustered into two groups: advanced, for which the technology frontier has been crossed and their own developments of new technologies prevail, and developing, for which the problem of the technology frontier remains important. Estimates have shown that the current value of the technology frontier is in the region of 70% of labor productivity in the United States. The comparison with previous estimates shows that this value tends to increase, which creates additional difficulties for the transition of catching-up countries from the mode of borrowing to the mode of creating new technologies.

Data are presented for 2021 on the rating of Russian economics journals, taking into account their international success: entering the leading Web of Science and Scopus databases and presenting their content in English. The calculations carried out using the author’s algorithm for ranking journals make it possible to establish that at present 25 Russian periodicals in economics have reached a sufficiently high scientific level and have become competitive in the international market of scientific products. If the concept of the market is interpreted in the broadest possible sense – as a set of competing participants entering into specific transactions that give them certain benefits, based on supply and demand for their services – then we can talk about a kind of revolution in the market of Russian economics journals due to the widespread use of strict academic standards and raising the scientific culture of domestic researchers. At the same time, the authors point to some negative aspects in the development of the pool of leading journals, including their high geographical concentration in only seven cities of Russia. Comparison of the parameters of the market for economics journals and the markets for journals in related disciplines – history, sociology, political science, and philosophy – showed that the competition for the right to be published in a prestigious Russian journal among economists is much higher than among representatives of other social sciences and humanities.

The study’s relevance is due to the gradual transition of different countries of the world to a post–industrial economy, in which the share of industrial employment is significantly reduced. However, this process is usually associated with high social costs and management mistakes. Russia is not a happy exception to this rule. The article aims to identify the pain points of the Russian labour market and the higher education system caused by the transition process. For this purpose, based on the data of Rosstat, we considered the phenomenon of the educational bubble in the university sphere in 1992–2008 and the reasons for its occurrence.

The article presents a simple model of economic growth based on the description of the dynamics of fixed capital formation. The main characteristic of the obtained fundamental equation of economic growth consists in an explicit link between the indicators of the GDP growth rate and the level of return on equity which allows not only obtaining the T. Piketty inequality, but also strictly determining the conditions for its implementation. The peculiarity of the fundamental equation of economic growth is in the postulation of the primacy of the capital circulation process which can provide an economic growth regime under certain conditions. The main difference between the author’s model and earlier constructions is the aggregation of most growth factors into one parameter. It is the profit rate (return on equity) which acts as the main driver of economic expansion. To strengthen the explanatory power of the fundamental equation of economic growth, the author considers two economic sectors – ordinary (with a low return on equity) and special (with a very high return on equity).

The article considers the influence of the complexity of the social system on the growth of financial costs for the maintenance of the central management system. The subject of the article is Professor Dmitry Sorokin’s theory that Russia cannot be a world technological leader due to objective reasons: a large territory, a severe climate, a multinational and multi–confessional composition of the population. These conditions predetermine a strong power vertical and increased financial costs, leading to the bureaucratic despotism and worse effectiveness of market innovation mechanisms. The relevance of the problem is in the need to clarify the management capabilities and limitations of regimes with strong centralized power. This issue is becoming more urgent due to the fact Wagner’s law, which requires faster growth of public expenditure compared to the economy, has ceased to operate. The article aims to theoretically illustrate and to test the theory by D. Sorokin. On this purpose, the authors built a simple theoretical model of economic growth with an institutional factor reflecting the properties of the control system.

Shifts in the global competition in the market of world–class universities (WCUs) are analyzed; the long-term restructuring of this market is considered in three geopolitical centers – the United States, Europe, and Asia – over the past 18 years of the 21st century. Nine of the most authoritative global university rankings were used as an information base. Calculations show that even though the positions of American universities in the top lists of world rankings are weakening, giving way to European and Asian universities, the United States continues to maintain leadership in this area. However, the authors’ expert forecast makes it possible to say that, if the emerging trends continue, by 2030 the number of WCUs of Europe and the United States in the Top 100 of many global ratings can be equalized, leading to a kind of Euro-American parity in the higher education sector. According to the authors, the desire of countries to create their own WCUs is a positive trend in terms of the development of global science.

This study tests the hypothesis that Russia’s economic sectors have different sensitivity to tax burden. Econometric models are built to explore the relationship between production in different sectors and the tax burden on these sectors. We use employment growth, labour productivity growth and world oil prices growth as control variables; to neutralize crisis effects we introduced a binary dummy variable. A peculiar feature of our models is that we build a certain a priori non–linear fiscal aggregate, which appears as one variable in an econometric dependency and comprises one or two exogenous parameters.