The article explores the evolution of active and passive labour market policies in the Russian Federation from the 1990s to nowadays, highlighting the roles of the federal center and the regions in its implementation. The study was based on descriptive and institutional analysis, as well as content analysis of regional employment programs. The results have shown that decentralization was applied only to an active labour market policy. At the same time the most ambitious goals were continued to be reached with additional organizational and financial support from the centre.

This paper is devoted to the analysis of the demand for older workers and age discrimination in the Russian labor market. The recent pension reform has brought widespread attention to these issues. Macroeconomic analysis showed that, despite the growth in the retirement age population and the increase in their presence in the labor market over the past decade, the demand for older workers has still been limited. One of the reasons for this situation is the relatively high age discrimination both in society and in the Russian labor market. Given this circumstance, raising retirement age should be accompanied by demandside efforts such as improving age discrimination legislation and age-friendly employment policy. The analysis of extensive international experience allows us to develop recommendations that will help smooth out negative effects of raising retirement age for certain categories of workers.

Though foreign language is widely accepted as an important form of human capital and a factor of economic growth, the labor market outcomes for foreign language skills in developing economies remain understudied. This research explores the returns to different levels of foreign language skills in the Russian labor market and tries do disentangle the differences in return associated with job characteristics. The results indicate positive wage premium for foreign language skills in Russia which approximately equals to 9% when controlling for job-related characteristics. Moreover, wage premium for advanced level of knowledge reaches 24%. However, there is considerable heterogeneity in the economic returns across age groups, levels of education, and occupations. The highest return to foreign language skills is obtained by managers and results to be 13%. For elementary occupations the estimate appears to be insignificant which proves that return to foreign language skills exists only for a limited number of specific jobs.

In the article prepared in connection with the discussion on the use of the Marxist political economy heritage and the revival of a special seminar on Marx’s “Capital”, the author shows the dialectic of the relationship between the content and the transformed forms of the modern capitalist system; the potential of “Capital” to understand the content of the modern economy, and the potential of economics to understand its forms. On this basis, the author shows which questions of our time are answered by Marxist methodology and theory, and which are not, and concludes that Marxist political economy has significant methodological potential to become an important component of the scientific and educational process in current conditions.

The authors, analyzing features of realization of monetary policy under inflation targeting, show that its application and evolution are based on the objective reasons related to a decrease of consumer prices growth rates all over the world and an increase of the integration of the world economy. It led to the ineffectiveness of other monetary policy regimes in open economies. It is true also for the Russian economy that has passed the way from financial mechanisms of centralized economy to inflation targeting. Its approaches and instruments have been adjusted in accordance with Russian realities. The authors show that application of inflation targeting regime in Russia along with other measures of macroeconomic policy have become one of the elements of the system of maintaining financial stability after the 2014 currency crisis.

Despite achieving success in the tight prudential regulation of the banking sector, the Bank of Russia (CB RF) continues to reveal new cases of negative net worth in banks. This paper investigates the influence of banks’ risk-taking and the interest rate policy of the CB RF on the depletion of net worth in Russian credit institutions during 2007—2017. The quartile regression approach is employed to examine the differences in net worth depletion of already failed banks; additionally, the Heckman selection approach is applied to analyze potential negative net worth that has not been revealed by the CB RF yet. The estimation results suggest that banks’ risk-taking matters: its increases are positively associated with the rises of the probability of bank failures and the size of negative net worth, conditional on failure. Ignoring of banks’ risktaking leads to a substantial upward bias in the estimates of the total size of negative net worth in the banking system — from 3.6 to 5.3 trillion rubles, or by 2% of the system’s total assets. Further, the interest rate policy of the CB RF has a risk-shifting effect: an increase of the key rate together with a rise of its volatility are associated with a further depletion of banks’ net worth. Finally, the paper shows that a joint increase in banks’ risk-taking and the key rate has a further negative effect on banks’ net worth.

In the aftermath of 2007—2009 global financial crisis, many economies had stuck in a liquidity trap. This stance forced central banks to implement various unconventional monetary policies, including massive purchases of financial assets, cutting policy rates down into the negative zone and reliance on forward guidance. In this paper we critically discuss these policy measures. Unconventional policy success in overcoming a liquidity trap heavily depends on the ability to manage private agents’ expectations. If the central bank is capable to form expectations of low interest rates for a prolonged period after the escape from a liquidity trap, unconventional monetary policies lead to a recovery. Another crucial issue is dynamic inconsistency of prolonged low interest rate policy. We discuss several ways of how the central bank can commit not to lift policy rate up to keep inflation unnecessary low. The problem of dynamic inconsistency, which complicates the formation of such expectations, is also considered, and possible ways of solving this problem are discussed.

The reviewed monograph makes a strong impression with its relevance, complexity and scale of the subject and also determination of 27 authors to conduct a versatile research of the present stage of economic globalization and its possible prospects. The authorship of the term is attributed to many, mainly eminent economists of the second half of the 20^th century studying general processes in the world economy. Its wide recognition happened in the 1990s, the term has become a widely used tool, but its interpretation and application vary greatly. The authors of the monograph consider economic globalization in dynamics, from different positions, seeking to reveal features of this process at the level of certain countries and groups of countries during their interaction in the world economy.