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.
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’.
The average Russian family lives on their salaries and pensions and only takes loans in exceptional cases. The vast majority of Russians are in fact millionaires, since almost every family owns their residence, while a third of all households also own other property, usually a 'dacha', i.e. a summer house. Thus, the combined value of assets owned by a typical Russian family exceeds that of many Europeans, according to the Russian Survey of Consumer Finance.
Muscovites who live between the capital’s Ring Road and the Third Ring Road are rooted in their region and, contrary to popular myths, do not try to move into the city centre. In their view, ‘Old Moscow’ is more a territory for rest than a business and residential area. This stereotype is also supported by Moscow’s radial ring structure, which is designed to regulate the influx of people into the city centre, Alexey Levinson said in HSE’s ‘Demoscope Weekly’ journal.
A drop in the public’s wages in September was accompanied by a growth in demand for durable goods. People tried to use this method to protect their savings from inflation. In addition, hopes for economic growth are becoming more and more illusory, as the main macroeconomic indicators are currently on the decline, experts from HSE's Centre of Development Institute said in the latest edition of New Comments on the State and Business.
Extracurricular activities continue to be popular among Russian youngsters, and most school students attend after-school clubs and classes, including those offered by their own school. Youngsters who are not involved in any after-school activities explain it by not having enough time or not having access to out-of-school programmes which are either non-existent in their community or out of their price range. These are some of the findings of a study by Daniil Alexandrov, Head of the HSE's Research Laboratory of Sociology in Education and Science (St. Petersburg), and Valeria Ivaniushina, Senior Research Fellow of the same Laboratory.
Integrating Russia’s academic community into the larger international community, internationalizing Russian academic journals, and improving the quality of publications and research – these are the ultimate priorities of a new project the HSE is participating in called the Russian Science Citation Index. The project is being carried out on Web of Science, a leading global search engine for academic publications. By the end of next year, a national database is to be created that comprises the best Russian journals and publications from the last ten years. The database will undoubtedly become a part of the international publication space.
Twenty-five million Russians would be prepared to move from cities to the countryside if offered the same living standards in terms of income and available infrastructure. While these conditions cannot be met in Russia at the moment, it is still possible for the government to take steps to encourage urban dwellers to move to rural communities, according to the study Motives, Conditions and Consequences of Migration from the Cities to the Countryside in Russia by Maria Neuvazhaeva, Masters' graduate of the HSE's Faculty of Sociology.
The 2008-2009 financial crisis could have affected people's values; however, researchers have not yet found any such changes in Europe. A study by Maksim Rudnev and Vladimir Magun of the HSE's Laboratory for Comparative Studies in Mass Consciousness and Peter Schmidt, former head of the HSE's Laboratory for Socio-Cultural Research, suggests that the recent financial crisis may have a delayed effect on society's values.
