The article provides a brief introduction to the research on banks and finan- cial crises, for which the 2022 Nobel prize in economic sciences was awarded. Forty years ago, the works of Diamond and Dybvig highlighted the critical role banks play in maturity transformation and explained why this role makes banking crises a natural byproduct, thus providing a theoretical basis for modern banking regulation. The concurrent work by Bernanke on the Great Depression, the worst peace-time economic crisis in mature market economies, demonstrated that banks’ closures were a critical factor in making the depression so deep and prolonged.

This article is aimed at examining institutional approaches to the theories of economic growth, and touches upon especially the influence of sociocultural codes on the development of the world economy. The presented study compares the rates of economic growth, taking into account various classifications of count- ries according to Angus Maddison, Ronald Inglehart, and the cluster approach. One of the main results is a proposal to move from the dichotomy and study of “advanced—emerging states” over long time periods, used in Maddison’s research, to the study of subgroups of countries, including cluster analysis, over a more compact period — 1992—2019. With the help of clustering, it was concluded that the group of the most developed countries retains an advantage in the level of development but does not demonstrate growth rates higher than the “catching up” groups. Thus, the convergence of levels of development does not actually occur. The article also illustrates that a disaggregated analysis of growth by clusters creates interesting opportunities for a further development of the research program.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has had severe negative economic impacts on households and businesses in Russia. Russia’s GDP declined by 2,7% in 2020. To mitigate the adverse impacts of the pandemic, in March—June 2020 the govern- ment implemented a number of fiscal and social policy measures aimed at support- ing businesses, employment and incomes of vulnerable groups of the population. This paper presents the results of the impact assessment of the COVID-19 crisis and the related policy interventions on the income distribution and poverty in Russia in 2020. The analysis is based on the tax-benefit microsimulation model for Russia, which allows for assessing the redistributive effects of direct and indirect taxes and transfers in Russia at the federal and regional levels. We find that the net effect of the crisis and policy interventions was strongly progressive at the bottom of the income distribution and equalizing across regions.

The importance of digital ecosystems in the economy is growing rapidly as more and more companies and consumers are involved in their circuit. At the same time, the regulation relevance is growing too, as evidenced by many antitrust cases involving companies such as Yandex, Google, Microsoft, which constitute the core of the respective ecosystems. The very concept of digital ecosystems does not have a generally accepted definition. However, national and supranational regulators must resolve disputes between the leader of the ecosystem and the complementary companies, as well as protect the interests of an indefinite number of persons (with the application of antitust law). Such disputes resolution leads to the fact that the regulator has to make decisions about the rules of interaction within the complex structure of relationships between all participants in ecosystems, de facto defining a framework for establishing institutional agreements. This paper proposes to apply the concept of “meso-institution” for some ecosystems rules, separating them from both hybrid institutional agreements (micro-level rules) and the institutional environment (macro-level rules). It is assumed that meso-institutions are a key element for digital ecosystems successful development. Using the example of companies and antitrust cases, the formation and evolution of meso-institutions, the capability of their design, and the regulator’s role are shown. The application of the meso-institutions concept makes it possible to justify the shift of focus of antitrust regulation in the field of digital ecosystems towards their self-regulation rather than strengthening legislative regulation.

The authors explore the impact of crises on the dynamics of trade between partners within regional trade agreements (RTAs) with the aim to determine whether RTAs have a stabilizing effect on foreign trade. RTAs have become one of the main instruments of trade policy in recent decades. It is generally recognized that RTAs do stimulate trade at the time of stability and growth. It is logical to assume that meeting commitments between RTA partners should lead to the preservation of trade flows between them in the event of a crisis. However, this statement requires empirical confirmation. The study examines the effects of RTA networks for the three most active RTAs’ participants located on different continents — the EU, Chile and the Republic of Korea. The analysis of dynamics of these countries trade flows indicates a clear trend of strengthening trade interaction between RTA partners during crisis periods. The focus of the methodology of the study lies in computations of three trade indices: export significance index, trade intensity index and symmetric trade introversion index. They were calculated for the totality of trade partners for the EU, Chile and the Republic of Korea from 2005 to 2020 in order to identify the dominant tendencies of trade flows during periods of economic shocks of recent decades (the financial crisis of 2008—2009 and the crisis caused by the pandemic of 2019—2021). The authors come to the conclusion that for the studied countries and the EU RTAs act as a damper that reduces the negative impact of crises on foreign trade. Trade between RTA countries at the time of a crisis either decreased to a lesser extent compared to trade between countries that do not have RTA, or recovered faster. This empirically confirms yet another significant importance of RTAs. The authors suggest to make similar calculations for other countries and RTAs to support the revealed pattern.

In the current geopolitical situation, Russian scientists may face difficulties in publishing the results of their research in foreign journals indexed in leading scientometric databases. Until recently, the productivity of scientific activity of Russian universities was mainly assessed by the number of articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science, which we consider in the context of the introduction of “academic capitalism”. In particular, in the updated version of the state program “Scientific and Technological Development of the Russian Federation”, one of the targets assumes that Russia will take the 5^th place in the world by 2030 in terms of the proportion of articles indexed in international databases. We evaluate the realism of achieving this indicator relative to the number of articles indexed in Scopus. The necessity to change the approach to the assessment of the productivity of scientific activity using the concept of “academic socialism” is substantiated. In the framework of this concept, it is proposed to develop a state program for expanding the number of Russian journals indexed in the world scientometric databases with a guarantee of financial support for the implementation of the Diamond Open Access model — no fee for publication or processing of the article and fully open access to it.

The article analyzes the use of bibliometric indicators to evaluate the work of scientists. We answer the question of why bibliometric assessments of scientific work have become so widespread in recent decades; also, we consider the pros and cons of such assessments from the point of view of public welfare. The paper gives recommendations for reforming the current system of assessing the effectiveness of scientific work. It is necessary to minimize reporting on publications and citations and not create conditions for a race in the number of citations and articles. Since citations of scientific papers have a delay, the assessment of published articles based on bibliometrics should have a lag of 1 to 5 years, depending on the research area. Publication in a scientific journal should not be the only form of presenting the results of scientific work: conference reports, reports (including grants), monographs, etc. must also be taken into account. For effective organization of science, formal rules alone are not sufficient; informal institutions are no less important, primarily the institution of scientific reputation. In order to stimulate its development in the Russian scientific community, we offer using the formal institution of vicarious liability — the responsibility of employers for violations of employees. Liability, in this case, means the dependence of state funding of an organization on violations of scientific ethics committed by its researchers. Finally, it is necessary to reinforce the significance of the institution of peer review, making this process more public.

Economic agents (humans) exchange information and thus can consider each other’s activities. This allows them to coordinate their activities. This study identifies three basic forms of coordination, depending on the communication options between agents: 1) the contractual form, which is possible with direct communications between agents; 2) the stigmergy, possible with indirect communications; 3) the common rules­based action form, possible in the absence of communications. The presentation of the observed processes of economic coordination as various combinations of these three basic forms corresponds to their description at micro level. Such a micro level representation has signs of a fundamental one, since the proposed three basic forms of coordination fully reflect the diversity of a person’s natural abilities to consider the activities of other people. As an illustration, a description of the known methods of economic coordination (market, hierarchical and network) is presented as combinations of basic forms of coordination. Within the framework of this micro level approach, the features of economic activity are analyzed, which determine the structure and main characteristics of the system of economic coordination processes. The analysis showed that, at the micro level, the processes of economic coordination are a complex hybrid of the three basic forms of coordination. This approach creates a unified methodological basis for the analysis of diverse methods of coordination used in the economy. The results obtained allow one to explore directions for improving coordination processes in the economy.

The paper investigates the mechanisms through which companies can gain additional competitive advantages through using a corporate website. We identified statistically significant relationship between financial performance and aggregated metrics of the corporate website based on sample of 1240 European and 1056 Russian companies. The study is implemented in two stages: (1) applying the principal component analysis to conceptualize website metrics and (2) evaluating a regression model with a dummy variable to analyze the relationship between the characteristics of corporate websites and the financial performance of companies. Principal Component Analysis identified two components that reflect the visibility and authority of corporate websites. Regression analysis showed a statistically significant relationship between these characteristics and the company’s revenue. Moreover, for Russian companies we observe that visibility of the company’s website has the highest positive effect on the revenue. On contrary, for European companies’ website’s authority provides the highest increase in its revenue.