The First Year of the Large Hadron Collider: A Brief Review

The first year of LHC data taking provided an integrated luminosity of about 35/pb in proton-proton collisions at sqrt(s)=7 TeV. The accelerator and the experiments have demonstrated an excellent performance. The experiments have obtained important physics results in many areas, ranging from tests of the Standard Model to searches for new particles. Among other results the physics highlights have been the measurements of the W-, Z-boson and t t-bar production cross-sections, improved limits on supersymmetric and other hypothetical particles and the observation of jet-quenching, elliptical flow and J/Psi suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(sNN) = 2.76 TeV.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, invited brief review for Mod. Phys. Lett.

Should Russia comply with EU food safety norms in the wheat sector?

The impressive volumes of wheat production in Russia on the one hand, and the good baking quality of Russian wheat on the other hand enabled Russia to become one of the important wheat producers and exporters of the world since the recent few years. However Russia has a long way to go in the “front” of Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS), i.e. food safety, standards. As part of a larger study, financed by the German Research Foundation, the current research addresses the objective of estimating the potentials of wheat production in Russia under more stringent food safety standards as the current Russian national SPS regulations are. The comparative advantage analysis based on the Domestic Resource Cost approach (DRC) is applied to estimate the possible compliance of Russian norms with EU SPS standards. The DRC analysis resulting in a ratio of 0,37 provides evidence of high social profitability of wheat chain in Stavropol region. Also the scenarios of compliance of Russian food safety norms with those of EU offers plausible solutions with DRC ratios varying within the range of 0,49 – 0,96 dependent on the fluctuations of model parameters. This is the third paper from the series of analysis of competitiveness of the Russian wheat sector under different food safety policies. The first paper estimated the policy of the full enforcement of national SPS regulations . The second work assessed the policy of compliance with the international SPS norms and considered also the sensitivity analysis under this policy. As far as the EU SPS norms are more stringent as the international standards, there is a necessity to assess also this policy option.DRC, wheat, food safety standards., Agricultural and Food Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Problems of Strategic Management Formation in Russian Agrarian Sector

The rapid changes in Russian agriculture during the last fifteen years require development of particular strategies for efficient farm management. The West-European approaches of strategic management and planning decisions are not directly applicable in the Russian agricultural economy; Russian large and medium-sized agricultural enterprises act on different organisational principles, due to the specific peculiarities of their business mentality. The objective of the research is to adopt modern strategic management concepts to the peculiarities of Russian agriculture and to work out proposals on formation of strategic planning system in agricultural production. To this end it is necessary to define the strategic planning features which take into account the nature of modern stage of the development of Russian economy and the specific character of agricultural production; to indicate the preconditions which promote the wide implementation of strategic planning into economic practice; to establish the features of the concept of strategic planning for agricultural enterprises and to elaborate a methodical set of instructions providing formalized character to strategic planning. Applying the methodologies of monographic research and expert interviews, we conducted the analysis of peculiarities and problems of Russian agricultural production, revealed and systematized the features of development of strategy for agricultural enterprises. Based on the results of our investigation we developed strategic development models for the agricultural enterprises of Stavropol region applying the approach of Strength /Neutral / Weakness (SNW) analysis of the methodology of comparative advantage. The usefulness and empirical value of the developed models have been approved on the example of “LUCH” agricultural enterprise, which is the first in the region according to effectiveness indicators and the fourth according to its relative size.Farm Management,