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on Confederation of Independent States |
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Issue of 2016‒01‒18
fourteen papers chosen by |
| By: | Natalia N. Morozova (National Research University Higher School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | This article offers a discussion of Russia’s post-Soviet search for international legitimacy, informed by the notions of social antagonism and hegemony elaborated by E.Laclau and C. Mouffe. It is argued that discourse on humanitarian cooperation in the CIS is at the heart of Russia’s current attempts to gain international legitimacy: it addresses the demands of identity construction antagonistically opposed to the European ‘other’ and simultaneously inscribes Russian identity within a counter-hegemonic normative discourse. |
| Keywords: | political legitimacy, identity, discourse analysis, hegemony, social antagonism, Russian post-Soviet foreign policy |
| JEL: | Z |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:24/ir/2015&r=cis |
| By: | Leonid R. Sykiainen (National Research University Higher School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | This article touches on the fundamental principles of Sharia judiciary, the modern practice of Sharia court activity in Muslim and Western countries and their establishment and functioning in Russia. The place which Sharia courts occupied in the judicial system of the Muslim state during middle ages, the general historical evolution of Sharia justice institutions and the role played by modern Sharia courts in Muslim countries, which depends on the place which Islamic Sharia occupies in their legal systems, are shown. The Sharia model of judiciary has been known in Western countries from the middle ages and today Sharia courts are still functioning in some of them. In Russia, Sharia institutions of dispute resolution were created in the 19th century. They existed in some forms until the end of the 1920s. After that, while they still existed, their decisions did not have any legal force. From the 1990s, Sharia courts began to re-emerge in Russia as religious or civil structures. Russian legislation provides the legal basis for establishing Sharia institutions of dispute resolution in the form of arbitration courts or mediation structures. Such institutions can be an alternative to illegal Sharia courts, and they could assist securing legal fundamentals and values within the Russian Muslim community |
| Keywords: | Sharia, Sharia courts, fiqh, legal doctrine, adat, Arbitration Act, arbitration tribunal, alternative methods of dispute resolution, mediation. |
| JEL: | K40 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:60/law/2015&r=cis |
| By: | Gulnara I. Abdrakhmanova (National Research University Higher School of Economics); Galina G. Kovaleva (National Research University Higher School of Economics); Natalia V. Bulchenko (Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation) |
| Abstract: | Structural changes influenced by ICT are having an impact on production processes and the release of products in the information and communication technology (ICT) sphere and content (on the level of individual enterprises) and are resulting in the pursuit of new approaches to socio-economic development, to increase the competitiveness of the country and to participate in the international division of labour. In order to identify development priorities and prospects in the information industry we therefore need a clear understanding of what the information industry is, what its boundaries are, what forms of economic activity make up this economic segment, and which products form the corresponding market. This working paper summarizes the results of a study to ‘measure’ the information industry as a segment of the economy producing goods and services linked to ICT and content. Methodological approaches are proposed to establish the ‘Information industry’ definitions based on the Russian Classification of Economic Activities (OKVED) and the Russian Classification of Products by Economic Activities (OKPD) in line with international standards and recommendations by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Key indicators of the development of the information industry are also tentatively calculated for Russia and compared with countries abroad. The content of this paper is based on research results commissioned by the Ministry of Telecom and Mass Communications of the Russian Federation and the outcome of evaluations and testing at a round table on the subject ‘IT industry: problems of classification and application’ round table (2014) and a session of the statistics section of the Central House of Scientists at the Russian Academy of Sciences on the subject of ‘Developing the “Information industry” and “IT industry” definitions based on the OKVED2 and OKPD2’ (http://www.gks.ru/free_doc/new_site/rosstat/sec/tez-abdr.doc). The paper was also supported by the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) and the subsidy granted to the HSE by the Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global Competitiveness Program. |
| Keywords: | Content and Media sector, ICT sector, information and communication technology (ICT), information industry |
| JEL: | C1 C5 C83 L63 L81 L82 L86 L96 M2 O14 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:56sti2016&r=cis |
| By: | Natalia A. Zevakhina (National Research University Higher School of Economics); Svetlana S. Dzhakupova (National Research University Higher School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | The paper proposes a functional approach to Russian metalinguistic comparatives examined in a cross-linguistic perspective. Specifically, on the basis of the Russian National Corpus, it argues for that Russian exhibits three such comparatives derived as a result of lexicalization of the following items: lucse ‘better’, skoree ‘sooner’, and bol’se ‘more’. The paper demonstrates that semantically, the comparatives denote Preferentiality, Probablity, and Prototypicality respectively. Morphosyntactically, it shows that they are quite distinct from standard comparatives and also from each other. |
| Keywords: | comparatives, metalinguistic comparatives, corpus linguistics, semantic map, functional syntax |
| JEL: | Z |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:39/lng/2015&r=cis |
| By: | Ilya Khankov (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow); Henry Penikas (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow) |
| Abstract: | Research is devoted to examination of the classifier, based on copula discriminant analysis (CODA). Performance of the classification of this algorithm was assessed. On samples, modelled with some typical features of corporate default data, sensitivity of the classifier was tested, to sample size, to default rate and to different patterns of variables’ interdependence. Alternative copula families’ selection method is proposed based on certain performance metric optimization. Difference in classification performance of different algorithms are investigated. On real data of Russian corporate defaults, CODA classifier was built. It was supported by single factor analysis, based on discriminant analysis too. Final model demonstrates better classification performance than Linear Discriminant Analysis and Random Forest algorithm, and is comparable to Quadratic Discriminant Analysis. Another experiment was set on data of Russian banks. Single factor analysis was assessed via standard procedure. CODA performance appeared to be lower than of Random Forest here, it was similar to QDA |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pav:demwpp:demwp0113&r=cis |
| By: | Koen Decancq (University of Antwerp, Belgium) |
| Abstract: | The Better Life Index was introduced by the OECD as a tool to chart the multidimensional well-being of its member countries. However, the Better Life Index relies only on aggregate country-level indicators, and hence is insensitive to how multidimensional well-being is distributed within countries. This paper discusses how a distribution-sensitive Better Life Index could be designed. A broad family of distribution-sensitive Better Life Indices is discussed and decomposed in interpretable building blocks. While a rich and comprehensive micro-level data set is necessary to implement the distribution-sensitive Better Life Index, no such data set is currently available for all OECD member countries. The paper constructs therefore a ‘synthetic’ data set that relies on information about macro-level indicators and micro-level data from the Gallup World Poll. The implementation of the distribution-sensitive Better Life Index is illustrated with this synthetic data set. The illustration indicates that, when taking the distribution of well-being into account, Nordic countries are top-ranked whereas Greece, the Russian Federation and Turkey occupy the bottom positions. The results indicate considerable losses due to multidimensional inequality for OECD member countries. In addition, sizeable differences are found in the level and composition of multidimensional inequality. |
| Keywords: | Better Life Index, multidimensional well-being, multidimensional inequality. |
| JEL: | I31 C43 O1 |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:inq:inqwps:ecineq2015-386&r=cis |
| By: | Bulat V. Nazmutdinov (National Research University Higher School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | Jurists and historians have rarely highlightened jural aspects of classical Russian Eurasianism. There have been several attempts to describe Eurasianist jural philosophy as a coherent system, but they were not fully relevant to the source material. The paper focuses on problems in the background of the creation of holistic Eurasianist jurisprudence during 1920s and 1930s. It emphasizes that the complexity of this process depended on different institutional and especially conceptual terms. The Eurasianists displayed several different approaches to Law whose distinctions were based on metajuridical grounds – phenomenological ideas in the work of Nickolai Alekseev, who argued for legal individualism; the “Alleinheit” theory found in the writings of Lev Karsavin; and a positivist theory in paper by Nickolai Dunaev. Based on published works of Eurasianists and unpublished archival materials, this research concludes that these juridical views were contradictory. These contradictions meant it was impossible to create a coherent Eurasianist jural theory using the terms derived from the authors mentioned, despite the fact that Eurasianist views have some specific characteristics |
| Keywords: | Eurasianism, ideocracy, legal order, legal theory, legal philosophy, legal schools, Natural Law, phenomenology, Russian philosophy. |
| JEL: | K10 |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:61/law/2015&r=cis |
| By: | Svetlana Toldova (National Research University Higher School of Economics); Ilya Azerkovich (National Research University Higher School of Economics); Yulia Grishina (University of Potsdam); Alina Ladygina (University of Tubingen); Olga Lyashevkaya (National Research University Higher School of Economics); Anna Roytberg (National Research University Higher School of Economics); Galina Sim (Lomonosov Moscow State University); Maria Vasilieva (Lomonosov Moscow State University) |
| Abstract: | Building benchmark corpora in the domain of coreference and anaphora resolution is an important task for developing and evaluating NLP systems and models. Our study is aimed at assessing the feasibility of enhancing corpora with information about coreference relations. The annotation procedure includes identification of text segments that are subject to annotation (markables), marking their syntactic heads and identifying coreferential links. Markables are classified according to their morphological, syntactic and reference structure. The annotation is performed manually, providing gold standard data for high-level NLP tasks such as anaphora and coreference resolution. The paper reports on inconsistencies in selecting NPs of various types as markables and their borders, and in ways of constructing anaphoric pairs. We consider the types of NPs missed by annotators, and the discourse and semantic factors that may have affected the annotators’ judgements |
| Keywords: | anaphora, coreference, coreference corpus, Russian language, corpus annotation, inter-annotator agreement. |
| JEL: | Z |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:35/lng/2015&r=cis |
| By: | Kutlina-Dimitrova, Zornitsa (DG Trade) |
| Abstract: | The aim of this paper is to assess the economic impact of the Russian embargo from 7 August 2014 on certain agricultural food products from the EU, the USA, Norway, Canada and Australia. The effects of this economic sanction are analysed in the framework of a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model with a particular focus on bilateral and total exports, production and welfare. The detailed, based on real trade data, calibration of the model allows for an exact identification of the sectoral shares and prohibitive tariffs aggregated to match the CGE model’s sectoral level of aggregation. In addition, the paper carries on a validation exercise to compare the model’s predictions with real trade data developments. The modelling simulation results show that the impact of the ban on total exports of the EU, the USA, Norway, Canada and Australia are limited. Total extra-EU exports decline by merely 0.12%. Nevertheless at a disaggregate level there are sectors – ‘vegetables and fruits’, ‘other meat’ and ‘dairy products’ – which experience two digit percentage change declines. |
| Keywords: | International trade; Agri-food embargo; CGE modelling; Russia |
| JEL: | F13 F17 Q17 |
| Date: | 2016–01–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ris:dgtcen:2015_003&r=cis |
| By: | Makhkamov Bakhtiyor Shukhratovich |
| Abstract: | In article the role and value of information and communication technologies in Uzbekistan, as engine of all economy, investments promoting attraction to the country, to creation of new workplaces, introduction of progressive technologies in production and management, that is finally – to the stable economic growth and increase of a standard of living are researched. Questions of formation and development of National information system which main objectives is development of telecommunication technologies, networks and infrastructure of communication, creation of information systems of automation of activity of government bodies and the centralized databases in the republic are also considered. Key words: information and communication technologies (ICT), legislative base of ICT, National information system |
| Date: | 2015–12 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:vor:issues:2015-12-12&r=cis |
| By: | Marc Fleurbaey, Erik Schokkaert and Koen Decancq |
| Abstract: | In this paper we examine whether, and how, welfare economics should incorporate some insights from happiness and satisfaction studies. Our main point, based on the principle of respecting the individuals’ judgments about their own lives, is that one should not focus on reported satisfaction levels but on the ordinal preferences reported by individuals over the various dimensions of life. We illustrate with data from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) how to retrieve this information from happiness surveys. Creation-Date: 2009-04 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:qeh:ophiwp:ophiwp020&r=cis |
| By: | Yury Lander (National Research University Higher School of Economics); Irina Bagirokova (National Research University Higher School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | This paper describes the behavior of a subordination marker -n in modal necessity constructions in West Circassian, a polysynthetic language belonging to the Northwest Caucasian family. We show that n functions as a simple suffix in the non-epistemic construction and as a phrasal affix in the epistemic construction. Hence, this morpheme violates the principle according to which the formal characteristics of a linguistic element should remain the same in different contexts of its use. This violation is explained by the difference in the semantic contribution of the suffix under discussion in different patterns and by the typological specifics of West Circassian, which allows its speakers to manipulate with morphemes more freely |
| Keywords: | West Circassian, modality, polysynthesis, phrasal affix |
| JEL: | Z |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:38/lng/2015&r=cis |
| By: | Timofey Arkhangelskiy (National Research University Higher School of Economics); Natalia Tyshkevich (National Research University Higher School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | In this paper we present our fieldwork data from the Bessarabian Yiddish, formerly the main language of the Jewish population of Moldova. Social upheavals of the 20th century caused huge migration of Jews from Eastern Europe, leading to separation of survivors from their community. This situation has dramatically influenced their linguistic knowledge of Yiddish, showing structural changes characteristic for language loss. These changes include significant increase in variability and structural simplification due to paradigmatic leveling and influence of the dominant language. The paper presents two case studies that investigate these effects on different levels of language organization: the diminutive formation model and the periphrastic verbal construction |
| Keywords: | language death, Yiddish, diminutives, periphrastic constructions. |
| JEL: | Z |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:36/lng/2015&r=cis |
| By: | Timofey Arkhangelskiy (National Research University Higher School of Economics); Yury Lander (National Research University Higher School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | Although there exist comprehensive morphologically annotated corpora for many morphologically rich languages, there have been no such corpora for any polysynthetic language so far. Polysynthetic languages raise a variety of theoretical and practical challenges for corpus linguistics. Some of these challenges have been partly addressed when developing corpora for e. g. Turkic or Uralic languages, while others are unique for this kind of languages. Our paper identifies the most prominent challenges that we are facing in the course of development of West Circassian (Adyghe) corpus, and offer possible solutions. These include the tokenization problem, which involves delimiting morphology from syntax, the problem with lemmatization and part-of-speech tagging, and a number of glossing and search problems. |
| Keywords: | language corpora, polysynthesis, West Circassian |
| JEL: | Z |
| Date: | 2015 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hig:wpaper:37/lng/2015&r=cis |