• M. Ellman — What Did the Study of the Soviet Economy Contribute to Mainstream Economics?
• G. Kolodko — Neoliberalism and the World Economic Crisis

• V. Mayevsky — Reproduction of Fixed Capital and Economic Theory
• A. Orlov — On the Economic Nature of Depreciation

• V. Gazman — Arrhythmia of the Lease Market
• R. Nureev, D. Kondratov — World Automobile Market: before and after the Economic Crisis
• G. Boush — Typology, Identification and Diagnostics of Clusters of Firms: A New Methodological Approach

• L. Ruzhanskaya, S. Lukyanov — Dividend Policy of Russian Companies and the Investors’ Interests

• Golubev A. V. Crisis and Russian Agriculture

• Corporate Governance under the Crisis (The Round Table at the Institute of Contemporary Development — INSOR)

Abstracts

Commodity resources offer vast opportunities for development. In the long run, however, the performance of commodity-rich countries tends to fall short of expectations, as commodity rents induce macroeconomic volatility and undermine incentives to improve institutions. The paper looks at the strategies that countries can adopt to avoid the "resource trap". These strategies aim at diversifying the economy, promoting financial development, building up stabilization buffers that lower macroeconomic volatility, and reducing inequality. The resource-rich transition countries have embraced these strategies to varying degrees, and with varying success. Improving institutions remains the key challenge.

The paper examines the composition and structure of private sector demand for alternative assets: real capital, high power money, government obligations. The private sector assets demand is limited by its resources: savings, foreign and domestic borrowing, and reshuffling of previously accumulated assets. The government assets demand in the Russian economy is a passive reflection of the private sector assets demand. This fact distorts the monetary policy, causes ineffective using of development resources. The government assets demand and its supply of financial assets to the private sector must play an active role, enlarging and correcting the private sector assets demand. The control over trans-border capital movement is the necessary condition for that end.

This article is an overview of the contribution made by economic Sovietology to mainstream economics. The long debate about the universal applicability of mainstream economics is reconsidered in the light of the Soviet experience. Information is provided on the contribution of the study of the Soviet economy to fields as diverse as the measurement of economic growth, institutional economics, economic administration, the economics of property rights, the economics of the informal sector, the economics of famines, the Austrian critique of general equilibrium theory, and incentives.

The paper criticizes neo-liberal ideology as responsible for the recent crisis faced by the world economy. The author analyzes possibilities of forecasting the crisis and shows that modern economic views and values are inadequate for overcoming the crisis and preventing such problems in the future. An alternative system of economic values is proposed which could ensure sustainable economic development.

The paper presents a new version of reproduction theory which (unlike Marx’s theory) allows the existence of fixed capital reproduction in value terms and the necessity of the current work time expenditure for the realization of this process. The new version permits to solve a well-known problem of the redundancy of the category of "value" and the related problem of the so-called dual system approach. The author managed to formalize Marx’s law of value and to discover the circular flow process of "depreciation" money which serves reproduction of the fixed capital.

Economic theory considers depreciation as a part of value transferred from the fixed capital stock. But economic practice rejects this view. Economic performance is determined both by profit and depreciation. Their unity is to be found in capital investment and accelerated depreciation. Depreciation is not identical with direct costs, but is included in the cost price of products to ensure the renewal of fixed capital.

The article describes the impact of the current crisis on the lease industry in Russia and gives estimation of lease market volatility, including variability of new lease business value, lease portfolio size and market structure. The author considers cooperation strategies that lease market players use in the crisis period and specifies factors that worsen lease portfolio quality taking into account doubtful and problem corporate debt. The lease effect on macroeconomic proportions is analyzed with calculation of lease capacity of investment and GDP. Comparative analysis of lease concentration in Russia and other European countries is presented. The author’s model of lessors specialization is offered as well as a new model of defining formation of lessors leverage.

The article deals with the world automobile market before and after economic crisis. The paper analyzes features of its growth for the last 20 years and considers the structure of the world vehicle production and behavior of the largest manufacturers. The dynamics of Russian automobile market for the period of 2001—2009 is shown. The effect of the current economic crisis on the world vehicle market is discussed. A number of short- and long-term forecasts of development of the Russian automotive market from various sources are presented.

The article presents the author's approach to typology of clusters of firms based on the categorical model "Row of informational criteria" (RIC). The sequence of informational criteria reflecting the logic of qualitative characteristics of clusters of firms is developed in the framework of the RIC categorical model. Based on the proposed approach the typology of clusters of firms, identification and primary diagnostics of Omsk agricultural cluster are implemented.

The paper concentrates on revealing basiс factors causing parameters of dividend policy. Analyzing practice of the Russian corporations, the authors conclude that, despite irregularity and in most cases refusal of payments by joint-stock companies, it is possible to determine similar features with the companies from the developed countries: concentration of dividends and circulation of the buy-back. Specific characteristics of dividend policy have become a consequence of poor quality of institutions leading to significant agency costs in firms: debt is not an essential restriction for payments of dividends; the effect of smoothing dividends is absent, the structure of ownership influences payments; large profitable companies pay dividends, also as a substitute for bad quality of corporate governance. Incentives of large shareholders reserving control over the companies are the main factor defining decisions on payment and the size of dividends.