Industrial Associations as a Channel of Business-Government Interactions in an Imperfect Institutional Environment: The Russian Case

International lessons from emerging economies suggest that business associations may provide an effective channel of communication between the government and the private sector. This function of business associations may become still more important in transition economies, where old mechanisms for coordinating enterprise activities have been destroyed, while the new ones have not been established yet. In this context, Russian experience is a matter of interest, because for a long time, Russia was regarded as a striking example of state failures and market failures. Consequently, the key point of our study was a description of the role and place of business associations in the presentday Russian economy and their interaction with member companies and bodies of state administration. Relying on the survey data of 957 manufacturing firms conducted in 2009, we found that business associations are more frequently joined by larger companies, firms located in regional capital cities, and firms active in investment and innovation. By contrast, business associations tend to be less frequently joined by business groups’ subsidiaries and firms that were non-responsive about their respective ownership structures. Our regression analysis has also confirmed that business associations are a component of what Frye (2002) calls an “elite exchange”– although only on regional and local levels. These “exchanges” imply that members of business associations, on the one hand, more actively assist regional and local authorities in social development of their regions, and on the other hand more often receive support from authorities. However, this effect is insignificant in terms of support from the federal government. In general, our results allow us to believe that at present, business associations (especially the industry-wide and “leading” ones) consolidate the most active, advanced companies and act as collective representatives of their interests. For this reason, business associations can be regarded as interface units between the authorities and businesses and as a possible instrument for promotion of economic development.business associations, economic growth, state-business relations, collective actions

Industrial Associations as a Channel of Business-Government Interactions in an Imperfect Institutional Environment: The Russian Case

International lessons from emerging economies suggest that business associations may provide an effective channel of communication between the government and the private sector. This function of business associations may become still more important in transition economies, where old mechanisms for coordination of enterprise activities have been destroyed, but the new ones have not been established yet. In this context, Russian experience is a matter of interest, because Russia was regarded for a long time as a striking example of state failures and market failures. Consequently, the key point of our study was a description of the role and place of business associations in the present-day Russian economy and their interaction with member companies and bodies of state administration. Relying on the survey data of 957 manufacturing firms, conducted in 2009 we found that business associations are more frequently joined by larger companies, firms located in regional capital cities, and firms active in investment and innovation. By contrast, business associations tend to be less frequently joined by business groups' subsidiaries and firms that were non-responsive about their respective ownership structures. Our regression analysis has also confirmed that business associations are a component of what Frye (2002) calls an "elite exchange" - although only on regional and local levels. These "exchanges" imply that members of business associations, on the one hand, more actively assist regional and local authorities in social development of their regions, and on the other hand, they more often receive support from authorities. However, this effect is insignificant in terms of support from the federal government. In general, our results allow us to believe that at present, business associations (especially the industry-wide and "leading" ones) consolidate the most active, advanced companies and act as collective representatives of their interests. For this reason, business associations can be regarded as interface units between the authorities and businesses and as a possible instrument for promotion of economic development

Business Associations as a Business-Government Liaison: An Empirical Analysis

Relying on the survey data of 957 manufacturing firms, conducted in 2009 by the Institute for Industrial and Market Studies we found that business associations are more frequently joined by larger companies; firms located in regional capital cities; and firms active in investment and innovations. By contrast, business associations tend to be less frequently joined by business groups’ subsidiaries and firms non-responding about their ownership structure. Business associations are a link in the framework of government-business exchanges, primarily at the regional and local level. Indeed, business association members are more active in assisting regional and local authorities in the social development of their regions and simultaneously they get government support more frequently. However, this effect proved insignificant for federal support. In general, our results allow us to believe that at present, business associations consolidate the most active, advanced companies and act as collective representatives of their interests. For this reason, business associations can be regarded as interface units between the authorities and business and as a possible instrument for promotion of modernization.business associations, economic development, collective actions, public-private partnership

Corporate Governance: Theory and Practice

no abstract è un libro

BAC-BROWSER: The Tool for Visualization and Analysis of Prokaryotic Genomes

Prokaryotes are actively studied objects in the scope of genomic regulation. Microbiologists need special tools for complex analysis of data to study and identification of regulatory mechanism in bacteria and archaea.We developed a tool BAC-BROWSER, specifically for visualization and analysis of small prokaryotic genomes. BAC-BROWSER provides tools for different types of analysis to study a wide set of regulatory mechanisms of prokaryotes: -transcriptional regulation by transcription factors (TFs), analysis of TFs, their targets, and binding sites.-other regulatory motifs, promoters, terminators and ribosome binding sites-transcriptional regulation by variation of operon structure, alternative starts or ends of transcription.-non-coding RNAs, antisense RNAs-RNA secondary structure, riboswitches-GC content, GC skew, codon usageBAC-browser incorporated free programs accelerating the verification of obtained results: primer design and oligocalculator, vector visualization, the tool for synthetic gene construction. The program is designed for Windows operating system and freely available for download in http://smdb.rcpcm.org/tools/index.html

Reconstruction of Transcription Control Networks in Mollicutes by High-Throughput Identification of Promoters

Bacteria of the class Mollicutes have significantly reduced genomes and gene expression control systems. They are also efficient pathogens that can colonize a broad range of hosts including plants and animals. Despite their simplicity, Mollicutes demonstrate complex transcriptional responses to various conditions, which contradicts their reduction in gene expression regulation mechanisms. We analyzed the conservation and distribution of transcription regulators across the 50 Mollicutes species. The majority of the transcription factors regulate transport and metabolism, and there are four transcription factors that demonstrate significant conservation across the analyzed bacteria. These factors include repressors of chaperone HrcA, cell cycle regulator MraZ and two regulators with unclear function from the WhiA and YebC/PmpR families. We then used three representative species of the major clades of Mollicutes (Acholeplasma laidlawii, Spiroplasma melliferum and Mycoplasma gallisepticum) to perform promoters mapping and activity quantitation. We revealed that Mollicutes evolved towards a promoter architecture simplification that correlates with a diminishing role of transcription regulation and an increase in transcriptional noise. Using the identified operons structure and a comparative genomics approach, we reconstructed the transcription control networks for these three species. The organization of the networks reflects the adaptation of bacteria to specific conditions and hosts

Primary Sequences of Protein-Like Copolymers: Levy Flight Type Long Range Correlations

We consider the statistical properties of primary sequences of two-letter HP copolymers (H for hydrophobic and P for polar) designed to have water soluble globular conformations with H monomers shielded from water inside the shell of P monomers. We show, both by computer simulations and by exact analytical calculation, that for large globules and flexible polymers such sequences exhibit long-range correlations which can be described by Levy-flight statistics.Comment: 4 pages, including 2 figures; several references added, some formulations improve