News

Nearly 1,800 have registered to attend the XV April International Academic Conference. Registration has ended for the upcoming XV April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development, which will be held on April 1-4, 2014. Six countries—Germany, Italy, the USA, Ukraine, Finland, and France—account for almost half of all the foreign reports. Last year, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, the USA, France, and Japan were among the leaders.

Sebastian Galiani, Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and Visiting Professor at Universidad de San Andres, will deliver a public lecture at the HSE’s XV April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development. In advance of next week's Conference, the HSE News Service conducted this brief interview with Professor Galiani.

Many Russians, when asked  whether certain occupations, particularly those of a politician or an academic, are prestigious or desirable,will give a different answer depending on whether they are refering to their own attitudes, perceived societal attitudes, or preferred career choices for their children. So Konstantin Fursov and Valentina Polyakova, research fellows at the HSE's ISSEK, found in their study Monitoring Innovative Behaviour in the Russian Population.

The tension between migrants from the North Caucasus and local residents in Russia is due to cultural and value differences. Migrants share collectivist values, while the local population is more individualistic. Olga Verbilovich and Viktoria Galyapina, researchers at the HSE Laboratory for Socio-cultural Research, investigated the specifics of the mutual attitude between migrants and local residents in Moscow and Stavropol Krai through the use of focus groups.

Some 45% of residents in Russia’s small towns live with loans, and 23% have problems with repayments. A lack of financial literacy is the main cause of the problem. Formal credit has replaced informal borrowing and lending between community members and local retailers, Grigory Yudin and Ivan Pavlyutkin found in their study 'Debt and the Community: Two Debt-driven Economies of Small Towns'.

Nationalism in the post-Soviet republics did not arise solely as a result of the economic and political crisis in the Soviet Union. The longstanding policy of the Soviet elite aimed at forming a multinational state is what enabled it. Authorities sought to use ethnic diversity to strengthen the state structure, but the result was exactly the opposite. A study by Andrey Shcherbak, senior research fellow at the HSE’s Laboratory for Comparative Social Research (LCSR).

Prof. Dr. Christian Welzel's (Leuphana University, Laboratory of Comparative Social Research at the HSE — Saint Petersburg) research focuses on the question of how ordinary people’s value orientations vary across the political cultures of contemporary societies in a global comparative perspective. The HSE English language News Service asked Professor Welzel to tell us more about how he sees the problem of corruption.

Between January and March, 2014, the University of London (UoL) carried out a cycle of events as part of the annual monitoring of ICEF as a UoL Affiliate Centre. This is the highest status, which is only assigned to a small part of the institutions in partnerships with the UoL. The monitoring meetings were concluded with a visit by the UoL representative delegation to ICEF on February 24.