Honorary and Invited Speakers

Two mega-global events determined the first mega-turn in the history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. One of them (1) culminated in "globalization" and the exit from the "unipolar world order," with its consequences for governance, administration, culture, the role of government, and humanity. The second (2) was based on newer standards, especially for the countries of the South. The latter also focused on ways and recommendations to address the challenges that the rapid globalization of the world has created and continues to create for administration, public policy, national sovereignty, governance, democracy, human rights and cultures. The year 2020 appears to have marked the end of the First Mega-Turn and the beginning of the collapse of unipolar globalization and the world order system, as well as the beginning of the Second Mega-Turn, characterized by the rise of new multipolar systems of world order through the expanding BRICS, the EAEU and the global system of development banks, bypassing the dollar and diversified world currencies. This report is divided into three main sections. Section 1 provides a brief analysis of the changes referred to in the report as global mega-turns. Section (2) offers a strategic analysis of the directions of change, challenges and potential opportunities that global mega-turns may/could represent or offer in shaping a new system of world order in the transition period. Section (3) discusses strategic issues of public administration and policy, along with theoretical and practical issues of public administration systems and processes functioning in conditions of deep uncertainty and risks. In particular, the report examines the problems of creating a theory of systems and processes of public administration operating under these conditions, referred to in the report as “the theory of managing surprises in action.”

We develop a dynamic model of monetary-fiscal interactions and government debt. We introduce a novel channel of fiscal dominance through the maturity structure. Faced with an expansionary fiscal policy shock, extending debt-maturity under fiscal dominance becomes a strategic tool for maintaining debt sustainability without immediate price-level adjustments by the monetary authority. We show that extending the maturity of debt raises the interest burden of debt. To validate the results empirically, we assemble a novel central government security level dataset between 1999-2022 for India. We find that the probability of issuing a long-term security is approximately 7 percentage points higher in a fiscal dominant regime compared to a monetary dominant regime. Using the approach in Hall and Sargent (2011) for debt-decomposition, we show that the nominal return on marketable and non-marketable debt is the largest component driving public debt increases in periods of fiscal dominance between 1999-2022. Our paper highlights the’maturity-structure’ channel of fiscal dominance, and provides a framework to quantify the impact of fiscal dominance on the interest-rate burden of sovereign debt in a large emerging market economy.

We will survey some applications of high-performance computing in research areas with significant societal importance, such as early warning tsunami systems and digital twins for seismic activity. The advent of exascale supercomputing, allowed the transition from pre-computed scenario databases to real-time data collection and physics-based simulations. Supercomputing is becoming exceedingly important in today's complex world, and this is exemplified by the evolution of the world's fastest supercomputers, as it is recorded by the website top500.org. Governments of several countries are spending inordinate amounts of money, in order to develop new more powerful and sophisticated supercomputers, given that the advent of quantum computing (i.e. the main competitor of supercomputing) is still in its infancy.

China has developed the world’s largest higher education system, with a gross enrollment rate exceeding 60% and more than 250 million citizens having received higher education. This expansion has significantly contributed to the country’s economic and social development. However, the current structure and quality of higher education remain insufficient to fully meet national strategic priorities, economic modernization demands, and public expectations for high-quality education, and still lag behind leading international systems. China’s higher education structure demonstrates a pronounced “pyramidal” pattern. Higher vocational education accounts for a substantial share of student enrollment, while postgraduate education and elite “Double First-Class” universities represent comparatively smaller proportions. As of 2024, undergraduate students accounted for approximately 51.7% of enrollment, higher vocational education for 43.7%, and postgraduate education for 9.5%. In contrast, postgraduate education in developed countries typically exceeds 20% of total enrollment, while undergraduate education generally accounts for more than 60%. Moreover, China currently has 147 “Double First-Class” universities, which enroll less than 6% of undergraduate students but are responsible for training approximately 80% of doctoral students and 50% of master’s students. While access to higher education has significantly expanded, access to high-quality higher education remains highly competitive. To better align higher education with national development goals, China aims to expand postgraduate education to over 7 million students and increase its share within the higher education system to approximately 15%. The proportion of undergraduate enrollment in top-tier universities is also expected to increase. These structural adjustments require reforms in disciplinary governance, strengthening talent training systems aligned with technological advancement and national strategic priorities, particularly in science, engineering, and medical fields. Further reforms are needed to address regional and institutional imbalances. While centrally affiliated universities represent less than 5% of institutions, they dominate among elite universities. Meanwhile, regional disparities persist, with higher education resources concentrated in eastern China. Future policy priorities include strengthening universities in central and western regions and enhancing their capacity to support national development and regional innovation.

Understanding how people make decisions under risk and ambiguity is a central question in decision theory and experimental economics. Under risk, probabilities are known. Under ambiguity, instead, people face situations in which probabilities are unclear, only partly known, or completely unknown. This distinction is crucial for understanding behavior under uncertainty, and a large literature has shown that choices under ambiguity often differ in important ways from choices under risk. At the same time, studying ambiguity in the laboratory remains a difficult task. To be useful, experimental designs must generate uncertainty in a way that is clear, theoretically meaningful, and well controlled. This lecture addresses the problem of eliciting preferences under risk and ambiguity, with particular attention to how ambiguity can be studied in the lab. Standard experimental paradigms—especially the well-known Ellsberg urn—have played a major role in the development of the literature. They have shown in a simple and powerful way that ambiguity matters, and that it can affect decisions in systematic ways. However, these classic methods also have limitations. In particular, they do not always allow researchers to vary and control ambiguity with enough precision. This makes it harder to study how people respond to different degrees or different forms of uncertainty, and to compare behavior across experimental settings in a flexible and systematic way. Against this background, the lecture introduces the Ambiguity Box, a new experimental tool designed to bring ambiguity into the laboratory in a more controlled, flexible, and tunable way than standard methods usually allow. The Ambiguity Box is not simply an alternative to the Ellsberg urn. It is a broader methodological tool that makes it possible to generate different kinds of ambiguity, to calibrate them more precisely, and to study behavior under uncertainty in richer experimental environments. In this way, it expands the set of questions that researchers can investigate and offers new opportunities to connect theoretical models with experimental evidence. The final part of the lecture presents evidence from a series of experiments using the Ambiguity Box. These studies show how the tool can be used to elicit ambiguity attitudes, explore differences across individuals, and examine how behavior changes when the structure and intensity of ambiguity are varied under controlled conditions. More broadly, the lecture argues that progress in the study of decision making under uncertainty depends not only on better theories, but also on better experimental tools. By improving the way ambiguity is generated and measured in the laboratory, the Ambiguity Box can help open a new stage in the experimental analysis of uncertain choice.

The report is devoted to an analysis of Russia’s strategic reorientation of its foreign policy and economy toward the countries of the Asia-Pacific region, the Middle East, and the Global South. It examines the historical and geopolitical prerequisites of this process, which under current conditions is taking on the character of a long-term and non-alternative vector of development. Successful integration into new markets and political alliances is impossible without a high-quality transformation of Asian Studies. The focus is on the tasks involved in moving from classical academic Asian Studies to an interdisciplinary model capable of providing the state and business with applied expertise. This entails training a new type of specialist who possesses not only linguistic skills, but also a deep understanding of legal systems, economic models, and the cultural codes of Russia’s Eastern partners. It is necessary to overcome Eurocentric approaches in education and research and to create new channels of intellectual cooperation. Today, Asian Studies is becoming a foundation for ensuring national security and building sustainable ties in a polycentric world, where success depends on an accurate understanding of regional specificities.

A city is a territory for self-realization and human development, providing unique opportunities for personal growth. At the same time, the urban population is exposed to numerous urban risks, including information overload, noise, light and sound pollution of the city, high population density, traffic congestion, lack of green areas, etc. All this leads to a deterioration in the mental and psychological well-being of the citizens. The growth of mental health disorders in urbanized areas is becoming a stable global trend. According to research, approximately 13% of the world's population suffers from various mental illnesses and has difficulty adapting to life. Over the past ten years, the frequency of diagnosed depression has increased by 39%, anxiety has increased by 21%, and panic attacks have increased by 20%. Feelings of loneliness and alienation have spread significantly among residents of large settlements. At the same time, it was proved that the patterns of behavior of citizens are largely determined by the conditions created by the city, including environmental factors. Currently, world science has collected an extensive evidence base for the response of different brain structures to various urban planning solutions, landscaping, architecture, design, etc. Neuro-urbanism, neuroachitecture, and neurodesign are an evolutionary trend in urban planning and space creation, allowing through the influence of environmental factors to maintain the mental health of residents and ensure the realization of their cognitive and creative potential, emotional sustainability and improvement of the quality of interpersonal relationships. It is proposed to consider new approaches to planning, designing and designing the environment and infrastructure for life in Russian cities, taking into account the mechanisms of response of brain structures to external stimuli. The basic mechanism of influence of such decisions is the neuroplasticity of the brain - its ability to adapt to external conditions through the formation of new neural connections. Neuroplasticity determines a person's cognitive potential, emotional stability, and social adaptation to the environment. Environmental factors that stimulate neuroplasticity include the water-green framework of the city, a multi-stimulus environment, biophilic design as a mechanism for integrating natural elements to reduce chronic urban stress, the creation of micro-social spaces with socio-cultural programming, etc. A key tool for creating an environment that ensures the mental well-being of citizens will be a model for the integrated development and assessment of urban environments and spaces based on advanced neuroscience achievements. This model should include regularly updated principles of neuro-design, implemented within the framework of urban planning policy and the creation of infrastructure for life, taking into account the accumulation of knowledge in the field of neuroscience and neurotechnology.

The Varieties of Capitalism literature highlights the role of national institutions in enabling coordination in skill formation but pays limited attention to the organizational mechanisms through which such coordination is implemented in practice. This talk addresses this “intermediary blind spot” by developing a typology of intermediary organizations and examining their role in shaping firm–school partnerships within China’s vocational education system. Drawing on comparative case studies, we identify four types of intermediaries defined by operational scope and sectoral coverage: local sectoral, local platform, multi-regional sectoral, and multi-regional platform organizations. Each type supports distinct partnership models through different combinations of three core functions: market connection, capacity building, and system governance. We show that intermediaries operate through dual embeddedness in both institutional and relational networks, creating functional complementarity that mitigates the trade-off between partnership depth and breadth. These findings extend the Varieties of Capitalism framework by demonstrating how intermediary organizations act as coordination infrastructure in contexts lacking coordinated market institutions. We conclude that effective skill formation depends not only on appropriate institutional arrangements but also on capable intermediary organizations that translate policy into practice and bridge diverse stakeholders.