Conference Programme

The hypothesis is discussed that the evolution of modern developed societies leads to a decrease in significance of institutions of authority and competition mechanisms; instead, the role of positive (not directed against third parties) collaboration increases. The grounds of this process are technical progress, and most importantly - cultural changes: the spread of tolerance, cosmopolitanism and altruism, increasing the radius of trust, internalization of honesty norms and, therefore mitigation of free-riding problem. As a consequence, collectivism and individualism in their extreme forms are replaced by the culture of constructive collaboration and compromise. Thereby the failures of the state and the market as well as parliamentary democracy are gradually being overcome.

   To ground the basic hypothesis, I consider three areas where recently the competition or the authority institutions dominated - the spheres of international relations as well as internal political and economic interactions. The evolution of legislation on bankruptcy and antitrust laws are discussed as well as coopetition effects, changes in the political systems in developed countries (consensus democracy by Arend Lijphart, the role of parliamentary committees), the emergence of international institutions, the role of civil society. It is shown that in the long-term evolution, the contradictions of  the competitive  and the state coordination mechanisms gradually softened, but not only and not so much due to their rational combination, but because of the increasing role of collaboration.

In this lecture, I will propose a new conceptualization of transition processes in Eastern Europe versus China.

I argue that with the perspective of time, transition outcomes in Central and Eastern Europe better understood by the dynamics of state erosion started under communism rather than by particular transition policy choices.  Post-communist states, while being autocratic or imperfectly democratic, are very different from the communist monopoly of power that existed under the socialist system.  They have become a turf war for kleptocratic networks for the purpose of corrupt enrichment. Reforming post-communist kleptocratic states to establish high quality institutions is a new and very different challenge from the transition away from the communist state and the socialist economy. 

The case of China is very different. China made a major institutional innovation in world history: establish a successful market economy under absolute communist rule, with the goal of consolidating the power of the Chinese communist party. The Chinese system faces specific survival challenges in the future (ideological vacuum, corruption, external environment), that I will review, but there are few hopes of major political reform in the short and medium run.

The Internet is just starting to provide free websites implementing sophisticated microeconomic answers to (a handful of) concrete allocation problems. The most popular site, SPLIDDIT (http://www.spliddit.org/), in the development of which I am involved, applies for instance the Shapley value to split a taxi fare with multiple destinations. To assign credit for a joint venture (e.g., a multi-authored article), it uses the "impartial" division method I invented, where one's ballot about the relative shares of other agents cannot influence one's own share.

I will focus on very recent theoretical advances in the classic problem of fairlydividing valuable objects without the help of a benchmark “market price”. Think of family heirlooms among siblings, shifts among interchangeable workers, seats in overbooked classes to students, or computing resources in peer-to-peer platforms. It is feasible to elicit additive utilities from the participants, but more complex messages are not realistic. It turns out that the allocation maximizing the Nash product is together compellingly fair, easily computed, and provide little incentives to strategic misreport of preferences. It is about to be offered for free on Spliddit.

Networks are everywhere. They are important, because they enhance existing theoretical knowledge in any field by providing tools of analysis to relational data – that is, market functioning, organizational problem-solving, and changes that take place on the societal level. This is because networks allow looking beyond the individual attributes of organizational, market, and societal players by building complex webs of relationships and information flow between them. The field of networks is truly multidisciplinary, as many social fields are interconnected and should be studied in parallel using the same instruments.

The purpose of this presentation is to acquaint the broader community of HSE and visiting academics with network research done on Russian data at NRU HSE International Laboratory for Applied Network Research. The team of approximately 30 young scientists from a diverse set of fields have been working for the past two years on a variety of problems, united by common methodology of network science. This presentation will provide a broad overview of research done by the lab, some peculiarities inherent to Russian data collection, encountered by our team, and insights from analysis that appears to be unique for the Russian sets of data. We will also address currently unresolved issues and outline directions for future research.

The global financial crisis of 2008 struck not only developed economies but also Russia, which had been promoting economic integration with the world economy in pursuit of the shift from a planned system to a market economy. This experience provides an important opportunity to study how Russian corporations are stalwart against an external macroeconomic shock and the role and evolution of corporate governance system in a crisis period. In this presentation, I will address to two issues from this viewpoint: First, how many Russian firms were forced to exit from the market by the global financial crisis and how did corporate governance quality affect firm survival during the period? Second, how did surviving firms evolve their governance system in the crisis? My study relies on results of an enterprise questionnaire survey conducted in 2005 in cooperation between Higher School of Economics (Moscow) and Hitotsubashi University (Tokyo) and its follow-up survey in late 2009.

I will report that the vast majority of exiting firms were forced to discontinue operation during the two years of 2008 and 2009, and the quality of the corporate governance system observed in 2005 had a statistically robust and positive correlation with the company’s subsequent survival probability. Furthermore, I will mention that my empirical analysis revealed that, in the Russian industrial sector, the quality of corporate governance has been improved through the crisis. I will also argue that, corresponding to the alignment hypothesis, in firms that decisively reformed their management and supervisory bodies in response to the 2008 financial shock, the total number of worker representative directors significantly declined, as did their proportion to all board members. On the other hand, I will also report that, in firms that substantially reorganized their audit system to cope with the crisis, the independence of the audit system was undermined remarkably, corresponding to the expropriation hypothesis.

Why are some governments popular with their citizens while others get low ratings? International surveys show enormous variation. In Bhutan in 2014, for example, 89 percent of respondents said their national authorities were doing a good job. In Bosnia and Herzegovina that year, only 5 percent said the same. Ratings vary not just across countries but also over time. Between 2008 and 2014, approval of top leaders fell by 42 percentage points in Armenia, but rose by 40 points in Zimbabwe.

Understanding the causes of such variation is important for several reasons. First, it offers insight into the mechanisms of democratic responsiveness. To hold their governments accountable, citizens must be able to assess their performance. If citizens’ evaluations track actual government effectiveness, then elections may both motivate incumbents to work hard and select for competence. If, by contrast, citizens are swayed by superficial images or state propaganda, elections will not promote responsive government.

Second, leaders’ ratings provide hints about the future. This is true in both democracies and authoritarian states. In democracies, the incumbent’s poll numbers suggest the odds of reelection. The ratings-obsessed democratic politician has become a cliché. Such officials may change their policies when falling in the polls. Low approval may also prompt challenges to the leader from within his own party. In systems where election dates are discretionary, popular incumbents may call an early vote hoping to cash in their advantage.

The leader’s ratings might seem less important in authoritarian and hybrid regimes, which are usually thought to depend on repression rather than on consent. In fact, in some dictatorships ratings matter even more than in democracies. It is not always true that force can compensate for low approval—sometimes, low approval makes it hard to use force. To do so, the dictator must rely on his police and security service. But officers may hesitate to follow orders if they think the regime about to fall. As Arendt (1969) put it: “Where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use. Hence obedience is not determined by commands but by opinion, and, of course, by the number of those who share it.”

The belief that a leader is loved can silence potential critics, creating a self-fulfilling faith in the regime’s stability. Conversely, low ratings may suggest vulnerability, encouraging opportunistic attacks and elite defections. In postcommunist Russia, presidents’ support among regional governors and parliamentary factions waxed and waned with their approval numbers (Treisman 2011). And the threat may be more immediate in systems where leaders are removed from office by coup or revolution rather than electoral defeat. An unpopular leader in a democracy must worry about replacement at the next election; an unpopular dictator needs to worry about it every day. 

For these reasons, authoritarian leaders sometimes seem  moreobsessed with polls than their democratic counterparts. Some invest heavily in their own surveys. General Pinochet hired Gallup in the late 1970s to question the Chilean masses (Singer and Scotto 2004, p.478). President Salinas of Mexico set up three separate polling agencies to serve the ruling PRI party, the president’s office, and the government newspaper, while also appointing fulltime pollsters to his staff (Moreno 1996, p.152). Poland’s Communist leaders in the 1980s, reluctant to rely on secret police reports, commissioned multiple surveys to test the effectiveness of martial law (Nalepa and Pop-Eleches 2014).

Besides providing hints of future leader or regime change, approval ratings affect the incumbent’s ability to achieve his goals. High poll numbers constitute a form of “political capital” that can be “spent” on enacting policies. In the US, popular presidents can better determine the agenda and enlist Congress’s backing (Canes-Wrone and de Marchi 2002; Barrett and Eshbaugh-Soha 2007). A similar logic applies in some authoritarian and hybrid systems. Lacking an organized political party, Peru’s President Fujimori “used public opinion polls to fight his opponents in Congress and gain political momentum” (Carrión 2006, p.128).

This paper is, we believe, the first systematic, global, comparative study of political approval. We examine a panel of country averages from up to 128 countries, spanning all continents, over the years 2006-2014. Our source, the Gallup World Poll, uses a standard question to assess government approval and includes a variety of other useful measures of opinion and attitudes. The availability of data for up to 9 years makes it possible to control for fixed country characteristics and explore the dynamics of approval in a global setting. Although we cannot make strong causal claims, the broad coverage and panel structure allow for the most comprehensive and detailed picture of this phenomenon to date.

We explore, among other questions: the impact of economic conditions, wars, and other plausible determinants of leader popularity; whether patterns of government approval differ in democracies and non-democracies; and the role of propaganda, censorship, and political repression on the expression of approval and disapproval. 

This workshop is for anyone who wants to explore how to implement a form of problem solving, leadership development and knowledge management called “transformative action learning.”   

Transformative action learning is a tool that has an extraordinary capacity to help managers get powerful results. Transformative action learning promotes team building, leadership, creativity, group emotional intelligence, practical solutions and organizational learning. 

Transformative action learning involves real people resolving and taking action on real problems in real time and learning while doing so.  Transformative action learning makes inquiry and reflection central to the group as members learn with and from each other while attempting to change the organization.

In transformative action learning, group members question their own mindsets as well as the basic taken-for-granted assumptions of the organizational culture. The change implemented in the organization is termed “action” and the change in the mindset, assumptions and beliefs of group members is termed “transformative learning.” 

Transformative action learning has been widely adopted by Fortune 100 companies, the US Government, and the European Commission as the preferred method for solving urgent problems, building teams, developing leaders and changing organizational culture. 

Twenty-first century is the century of globalization and global knowledge explosion. Globalization has many meanings and interpretations with different implications and consequences, good, bad, and ugly. It has had profound implications with serious challenges for developing and developed nations, their governance and public administration systems. Knowledge is power and power is essential to governance and public administration. Advancing knowledge is the key to building capacity and meeting the challenges of globalization; it expands the horizons of possibilities and opportunities worldwide.

New digital business ecosystems (Nachira, et al 2007) are emerging mirroring business networks and information flows. At the base of these ecosystems are smart sensors that collect, receive and send real-time information through the Internet into a platform that underpins B2B information requirements and services. This collective of sensors – the ‘Internet of Things’ (IOT) – is expanding at an explosive Cambrian level with estimates connecting to the Internet varying wildly from Cisco’s official estimate of 1 billion at the end of 2012 to over 27 billion by 2020 (Varley 2013), compared to TSensors Summit (2013), estimates of over 10 billion sensors in 2013, growing to over 1 trillion sensors to be connected to the Internet by 2022! Sensors may be found in almost everything by 2020 and will generating huge streams of data – Big Data. Frameworks for defining and classifying big data are emerging including IBM’s (2014) four V’s framework (volume, variety, velocity and veracity). Marr (2015) added a 5^th V to the IBM framework – value.

A B2B digital business ecosystem is outlined including real business value creation ecosystem and digital ecosystem with IOT, Big Data, and information services platform, layers – and  interactions by B2B actors (human and increasingly becoming digital) to produce products, services, ideas and activities. Data science is emerging focusing on capture, curation, analysis and use of big data streams. Datafication includes big data and includes value creation (Norman, 2001; Lycett, 2013). The IOT underpinning B2B services was outlined by Sood & Pattinson (2013) and Big Data for B2B value creation by Johnston, Nickell, Liu & Gould (2014). Discussion on the emerging area of marketing data science (in a B2B context), B2B digital business ecosystems and how far they may go in terms of imitation or taking over of real value creation system is presented at the end of the paper.

Discussion

Issues for discussion:

- challenges of new industrial revolution

- promising areas of advanced manufacturing development in Russia

Discussant: A. Chulok (HSE)

Participants of discussion:
Representatives of Stony Brook University (USA), National Research University Higher School of Economics, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Skoltech, INUMIT, Siemens PLM Software

Discussion

Discussion

Issues for discussion:
- trends, drivers and barriers for introduction of advanced manufacturing
- industrial applications of advanced manufacturing technologies

Discussant: K. Vishnevsky (HSE)

Participants of discussion:
Representatives of Stony Brook University (USA), National Research University Higher School of Economics, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Russian venture company, Skoltech, INUMIT, Siemens PLM Software

Discussion

Issues for discussion:

What most important indicators should be considered in the development of scenarios for renewables?

What are the differences and similarities in various renewable energy scenarios?

What are the key features of the visionary future and most pessimistic renewable energy scenarios for Russia?

Discussion Issues for discussion:
- Evaluation of national STI policies: Effectiveness and results
- Human resources in STI
- Building of national competitive advantages in STI

Discussant: D. Korotkov (Ministry of Education and Science of the RF)

Rising levels of economic and physical security are reshaping human values and motivations, and thereby transforming societies.  Basic values tend to be instilled during one’s pre-adult years and persist in later life.  But if a society’s younger birth cohorts grow up under fundamentally different conditions from those shaping older cohorts, the society’s prevailing values can change, generally at the glacial pace of intergenerational population replacement.

Economic and physical insecurity are conducive to xenophobia, strong in-group solidarity, authoritarian politics and conformism to traditional cultural norms. Conversely, secure conditions lead to tolerance of outgroups, openness to new ideas and more egalitarian social norms.  Consequently, the rapid economic growth and expanding welfare states experienced by developed societies after World War II brought an intergenerational shift from emphasizing economic and physical security above all, toward greater emphasis on free choice, environmental protection, gender equality and tolerance of gays.  This contributed to major societal changes such as the legalization of same-sex marriage and a sharp increase in the number of democracies around 1990.  Subsequent economic stagnation, rising inequality and high unemployment have retarded this value shift, encouraging growing xenophobia and authoritarianism.  Nevertheless, acceptance of gender equality and homosexuality have become socially desirable attitudes in secure societies and continue to spread rapidly.

The plight of children improved dramatically over the 20th Century. Infant and child mortality, for instance, declined globally over the past six decades and infant deaths have declined across countries occupying very different positions in the world-system (World Bank, 2015), but considerable cross-national variation in infant mortality remains at the beginning of the 21st Century (Central Intelligence Agency, 2013) and child mortality reduction goals under the UN’s 2015 Millennium Development Goals will not be met (United Nations, 2014; World Bank, 2015). Consider the fact that there was a 100-fold variation in the infant mortality rate across countries in the world-system in 2013: Monaco had a rate of 1.81 infant deaths per live 1,000 births, while Afghanistan had a rate of 187.5 infant deaths per 1.000 live births (Central Intelligence Agency, 2013).

Why does infant mortality continue to vary so widely across countries of the worldsystem? Various explanations have been offered, but little attention has focused on examining the validity of these explanations simultaneously with recent data. This gap in the literature was addressed in a cross-sectional analysis of the determinants of infant mortality in 2010 for a sample of 144 countries. The empirical validity of four  macrosocial change theories was examined: gender stratification theory, modernization theory, dependency/world-systems theory, and developmental state theory. Strong support was found for gender stratification theory: female education had a negative effect on infant mortality. Support was also found for modernization theory: as industrialization increased, the infant mortality rate decreased. No support was found for developmental state theory (the level of state intervention in the economy) and dependency/world-system theory (position of the country in relation to the core countries). Several control variables were examined (population growth and democracy, among other variables), but only Sub-Saharan Africa status proved to be an important predictor: Sub-Saharan African countries had a significantly higher infant mortality rate than their non Sub-Saharan African counterparts. Increasing gender equality seems to be the most rational means for reducing infant mortality. Implications of the results and suggestions for future research are discussed.

Martin Carnoy (Stanford Unversity) Is improving educational quality a viable policy tool for equalizing income distribution?

Many analysts since Simon Kuznets (1955) have claimed that expanding education would eventually contribute to a decline in income inequality. More recently, some have argued that improving the quality of education would do the same. However, the education is mixed on educational expansion and income inequality. Most recently, income inequality in almost all Latin American countries has declined, and researchers (Barros, 2007) are arguing that this is in part due to the expansion of education and a corresponding decline in the rate of return to schooling. In this presentation, we exam these claims, focusing on the difficulties of disaggregating the effects of educational expansion from incomes policies contributing to declining or increasing income inequality. Specifically, we argue that educational expansion and improvements in educational quality may contribute to declining income inequality when other factors, such as government transfers and tax policies are working to decrease inequality. To the contrary, educational expansion and quality improvement may have little effect on income inequality when transfers and tax policies are working to increase inequality.

Michael J Feuer, (The George Washington University) From Science to Policy: The US Evidence Movement and Lessons for Inequality Research

Richard Murnane (Harvard) Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children's Life Chances in the United States.

Increases in family income inequality in the United States over the last 40 years have translated into widening gaps in educational achievement and attainments between children from low- and high-income families.  The talk has three goals related to these trends.  The first is to describe and interpret the evidence on trends in inequality in educational outcomes based on family income.  The second is to describe the evidence on the mechanisms through which increases in family income inequality resulted in increases in inequality of educational outcomes.  The third is to describe the data sources that have been important in documenting trends in educational outcomes and the explanations for these trends, and to assess the strengths and limitations of these data sources.

D. Konstantinovsky (IS RAS) «Social inequality: from education to the labor market»

The new effects in Russian education are combined with the previous and persistent ones. Therefore it is necessary to analyze the dynamics over a long period, since many problems are in fact modifications of what we had long ago. Several important problems that the post-Soviet youth faces today have roots in the Soviet past, and by this reason the results of studies conducted from the 1960s until today are presented.

It is shown that new situation (expansion of higher education plus declining of high school graduates numbers) leads to new effect: there are generally no significant differences between the intentions (in sphere of education) of young people from various social groups. Insistent striving of youth to get a university diploma and optimistic assessment of the competitive situation are expressed in these data.

However, these were only intentions. All groups of high school graduates demonstrate an increased frequency of admission to universities. But obvious differentiation is clear: the higher the status of families, the greater is the number of their children entering universities and the smaller is the number of those joining colleges and vocational schools. On the contrary, the lower the status of families, the more of their children do not enter universities but go to study in colleges and vocational schools as well. The situation has changed for the better, but inequality persists. Clear differentiation remains in all the 50-years period of the research.

The new labor market required qualified specialists. At the same time, employers need quite a number of more or less socialized young people, and such competency is considered to be a result of staying in a higher education institution. Both kinds of the labor market demand were transmitted into families, which, in turn, transmitted the demand to the educational system. Higher education responded adequately to the family demand. Universities undertook differentiation: some provide knowledge, along with socialization, confirmed by diplomas; others just give diplomas plus socialization.

Diplomas obtained in different universities have different prices in the labor market. The differentiation of universities discussed above (some provide education, others give quasi-education) may not always be very noticeable in the process of observing the educational sphere, but clearly manifests itself in the labor market. Differentiation of universities increase the social differentiation in the labor market. This effect may be particularly pronounced in the current economic situation.

On the whole, we see the following picture. Using the findings of the 50-year research it is shown that new situation has led to greater uniformity in the aspirations for education among young people and to their broader participation in higher education. However, this has not proved conducive to lessening social inequality in the sphere of education. Also, studies of the labour market testify that inequality is transmitted from educational sphere to the labour market, and the growth of university differentiation has raised inequality in the labour market.

Henry M. Levin (Columbia University) Investing in the Higher Education of the Disadvantaged: A Benefit-Cost Approach

Students from disadvantaged families face obstacles in reaching and completing higher education.

Even when disadvantaged students are able to enter higher education in the U.S., they are  unlikely to complete a degree.  Most such students seek a two year, associate degree from a local community college with the hope of 
transferring to a four year university to complete the BA degree.  However, less than one-fifth of such students succeed in completing the two year associate degree.  This presentation reviews the costs and benefits of a public investment to increase the community college completion rate of the disadvantaged.  As an investment there are public benefits from degree completion in the form of increased tax revenues of graduates and reduced
public costs of crime, health, and public assistance. The economic benefits of this public investment are found to be far greater than their costs, contributing to greater equity and social efficiency.

Bianchi Patrizio (University of Ferrara) Technical school, vocational training, social inclusion. A challenge for the Europe in the age of migration: the case of Italy

Italy has traditionally been an emigration country. Since the end of XIX century to the beginning of WWI almost 15 millions people migrated from Italy to the Americas. After WWII migration flows moved from South Europe to northern countries, and then from Southern regions to the restricted industrial areas of Italy. This established  a culture of migration.

A new story started in 1980. Italy became a country with a positive migration rate; in the 80s limited flows from mediterranean countries like Marocco and Tunisia, and Philippines, a catholic country, started arriving. In the nineties massive flows arrived from Post-Communist countries. Over the last 15 years  refugees have been flowing from Mena countries uprisings (Middle east and North Africa), but most of these people travel to transit through Italy toward northern Europe countries.

Today in Italy we have to manage long term immigration, with a view to being integrated in the Italian society (5,2 milions people, 8,2% of Italian citizens), and a flow of 250,000 people from North Africa through Lybia, and from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan through Balkan routes.

In both cases, School and vocational training are crucial instruments to face the two interrelated and at the same time  different crisis.

In the  case of refugees it  provides the minimum linguistic instruments to face the transition to a new life.

Long run migrants are a different case, being technical School and vocational training TSVT the main tool for integration of migrants in Italian society nowadays.

Data explain clearly that immigrants have a higher probability of 1 - 2 years of delay in study careers, due essentially to scarce linguistic competences. Data explain moreover that foreigners also have an higher barrier to entry labour market, and in any case to enter high competence market.

Emilia-Romagna is the Region with the  highest level of long term immigration, with a 15% of enrolled foreign student. Foreign students are essentially oriented toward technical schools (central state-managed) and vocational training (regional administrations-managed), where foreign students reach up to levels from 30 to 50% of total enrolled ones.

Region Emilia-Romagna, by means of European resources, has promoted a reform of TSVT, inducing a strict cooperation among national and regional Education centres and local authorities in order to reduce dispersions and delays of young immigrants, through a system of interaction School/companies in order to insert students in labour pathways, while, at the same time, strengthening linguistic competences, to accelerate social integration. Nevertheless, immigrants today, and in particular those who were born in Italy, are essentially coming from East european  and western mediterranean countries, but now we have to face the entry of Mena countries refugees, and among them an increasing number of people with a tendency to remain in Italy.

The Emilia-Romagna experiment becomes therefore crucial first of all for establishing a new culture of migration, in a country with no tradition of immigration, and secondly  it represents an  opportunity to define a manageable policy of integration of immigrants in Europe.