The article is devoted to major events in the history of the post-Soviet economy, their influence on forming and development of modern Russia. The author considers stages of restructuring, market reforms, transformational crisis, and recovery growth (1999-2011), as well as a current period which started in2011 and is experiencing serious problems. The present situation is analyzed, four possible scenarios are put forward for Russia: “inertia”, “mobilization”, “decisive leap”, “gradual democratic development”. More than 30 experts were questioned in the process of working out the scenarios.

The roundtable discussion held on April 12, 2017 at the XVIII April international academic conference on economic and social development (April 11-14,2017, Moscow, National Research University Higher School of Economics) in cooperation with ARETT. In their presentations the participants of the roundtable considered the most serious issues related to working out and implementation of economic programs and reforms in Russia. The participants tried to understand the reasons of poor realization of program documents, reveal their advantages and drawbacks, and formulate the positive agenda.

We discuss the development of fundamentally new theoretical ideas stated by V. L. Makarov in his article “The calculus of institutions”. Some of them have already been implemented for different applied issues. Other ideas have a more debatable nature and require further development and testing on empirical data. In this paper, we pay the main attention to the institutional context, as well as to the formulation and analysis of decision-making procedures under coalition formation surroundings.

The article considers the particularities of the relations between companies in the markets of joint products in Russia. These particularities correspond, first, to the production technology, when one input through unit production process gives several products; second, to the consequences of the privatization of production facilities created during the Soviet Union period. The article offers a game theory model that shows how companies may use antitrust authority in their interaction strategies. This in addition to other reasons might explain the amount of cases on the abuse of dominant position where companies, which produce joint products, are involved.

The paper proposes a new approach to measure inflation expectations of the Russian population based on text mining of information on the Internet with the help of machine learning techniques. Two indicators were constructed on the base of readers’ comments to inflation news in major Russian economic media available in the web at the period from 2014 through 2016: with the help of words frequency and sentiment analysis of comments content. During the whole considered period of time both indicators were characterized by dynamics adequate to the development of macroeconomic situation and were also able to forecast dynamics of official Bank of Russia indicators of population inflation expectations for approximately one month in advance.

The article studies recent trends in the international role of the ruble. It is demonstrated that, despite the rise in the share of ruble settlements in Russian foreign trade, as well as in nominal value of ruble transactions in foreign exchange markets, ruble’s position in the global currency system has generally deteriorated. The analysis of factors behind choice of settlement currency, as well as of country cases, shows that, for ruble’s role to rise in the future, Russian authorities need to, on the one hand, ensure macroeconomic stability and promote economic diversification; on the other hand, take special measures to develop settlement systems, enhance financial market infrastructure, expand the volume of trade finance and trade credit insurance denominated in rubles.

The article deals with economic sanctions and their impact on the state and prospects of the neighboring partner economies - the European Union (EU) and Russia. It provides comparisons of current data with that of the year 2013 (before sanctions) to demonstrate the impact of sanctions on both sides. Despite the fact that Russia remains the EU’s key partner, it came out of the first three partners of the EU. The current economic recession is caused by different reasons, not only by sanctions. Both the EU and Russia have internal problems, which the sanctions confrontation only exacerbates. The article emphasizes the need for a speedy restoration of cooperation.

The present article undertakes a critical review of the new book of Jean Tirole, the winner of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics, “The theory of cor- porate finance”, which has recently been published in Russian. The book makes a real contribution to the profession by summarizing the whole field of corporate finance and bringing together a big body of research developed over the last thirty years. By simplifying modeling, using unified analytical apparatus, undertaking reinterpretation of many previously received results, and structuring the material in original way Tirole achieves a necessary unity and simplicity in exposition of extremely heterogeneous theoretical and empirical material. The book integrates the new institutional economic theory into classical corporate finance theory and by doing so contributes to making a new type of textbook, which is quite on time and is likely to become essential reading for all graduate students in corporate finance and microeconomics and for everyone interested in these disciplines.

The paper deals with comparative analysis of occupations in the regional labor market. Occupation is treated as a multi-dimensional space of characte- ristics, whereas a scalar form of a characteristic makes it possible to carry out a comparative analysis of occupations. Using cluster analysis of a pilot region indicators five meaningfully interpretable clusters of occupations were identified, reflecting their regional specificity.

The study reveals the role of the ocean resources in the modern world economy, as well as calculates the economic value of ocean assets for Russia. The paper gives some proposals for the strategy of utilizing ocean resources in accordance with the policy of sustainable development of the Russian economy.