Modernizing Russia: Round III. Russia and the other BRIC countries: forging ahead, catching up or falling behind?

The term 'BRIC countries' - Brazil, Russia, India, and China - traces its roots to investment banking, Goldman Sachs coined the term in 2001. The idea of large emerging economies catching up with, and challenging, the West has captured social scientists and policy-makers alike. However, the sheer size and different historical legacies dictate that there are enormous differences between the BRIC economies. Russiaÿs situation is in three ways unique among the BRIC countries. First, Russia was an industrialized nation long before the others, secondly, it experienced unprecedented economic decline in the 1990s and by 2008 Russia barely reached the GDP level of 1989; thirdly, unlike Brazil, China, India and in fact most of the developing world, Russia is not a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). These unique features beg the following questions that this document seeks to (at least tentatively) answer: first, what is the structural legacy of the decline in the 1990s in terms of technological and industrial capabilities in Russia; and second, what can and should Russia learn from the WTO experience of the rest of the BRIC economies until today. We argue, in brief, that while the decline of the 1990s is relatively well-known and documented on the macro-level (GDP) and more controversially in some of its micro-level and sociological impacts, there seems to be little awareness of the magnitude of devastation that took place during this period within Russiaÿs industry. Along with a massive increase in income from natural resources, a partial disintegration of the R&D system, and a greatly diminished policy capacity, the structural changes of the 1990s continue to pose grave challenges to Russiaÿs economic policy making. In fact, in many areas Russiaÿs technological and industrial capabilities have simply been lost.

European Eastern Enlargement as Europe's Attempted Economic Suicide?

We argue that the process of European economic integration has made a qualitative shift: from a Listian symmetrical economic integration to an integrative and asymmetrical integration. This shift started in the early 1990s with the integration of the former Soviet economies into the economies of Europe and the world as a whole, reached its climax with the Eastern enlargement of the Union in 2004, and now forms the foundation of the renewed Lisbon Strategy. This change is measurably threatening European welfare: the economic periphery in the first instance, and potentially the core countries as well. Two parallel processes aggravate this development: the timing of the enlargement at this particular phase of the evolving techno-economic paradigm; and the creation of the European Monetary Union along the so-called Maastricht route towards convergence and fiscal stability.

Industrial Restructuring and Innovation Policy in Central and Eastern Europe since 1990

The paper aims to show that, first, innovation policies deployed in Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries since 1990s have been a double-edged sword: on the one hand enabling fast and furious industrial restructuring while, on the other hand, locking CEE economies into economic activities with low value added/productivity growth and thus undermining future sustainable growth. However, the impact of accession into the European Union (EU) has been equally pivotal for industrial restructuring and innovation policy making in CEE countries in the 2000s and this process can be summed up as a strong Europeanization of innovation policy in CEE. The paper proceeds to show, second, that also Europeanization has been largely a double-edged sword for CEE countries. Since joining the EU in 2004 or 2007, and already during the accession process, there is a strong change in innovation policies in many CEE countries towards a much more active role of the state. In this change there is a clear and strong role of EUÿs structural funding, particularly the negotiations and planning that comes with it. However, these changes come with specific problems: first, there is an over-emphasis in emerging CEE innovation policies on a linear understanding of innovation (from lab to market) that is based on the assumption that there is a growing demand from industry for R&D (which is not the case because of the structural changes that took place in the 1990s via the Washington Consensus policies); and, second, increasing usage of independent implementation agencies in an already weak administrative capacity environment lacking policy skills for networking and long-term planning.

The Relevance of Ragnar Nurkse and Classical Development Economics

In this essay we aim to show, first, how the classical development economics, that of Ragnar Nurkse's (1907-1957) generation, epitomized the best development practices of the past 500 years and crafted them into what Krugman rightly calls high development theory. It is not a coincidence that the post-World-War-II era, when Nurkse and others ruled the development mainstream, is one of exceptionally good performance for many poor countries. Second, we argue that the alleged death of the classical development economics and subsequent rise of the Washington Consensus has to do not so much with increasing modeling in economics, a way of research purposely discarded by many classical development thinkers, but much more with misunderstanding the reasons for East Asia's success and Latin America's demise; we show that the root cause of this misunderstanding - that goes in fact back to 'misreading' key passages in Adam Smith - is the role of technology, or of increasing returns activities, and of finance, in development. Third, we aim to indicate key areas of further research that the current development mainstream should pursue in order to re-learn how to create middle-income economies and middle-class jobs.

Islamic public administration and Islamic public value: Towards a research agenda

This essay explores whether religion has a place in addressing public challenges, particularly in the context of Non-Western Public Administration paradigms such as Confucian, Buddhist, and Islamic. The authors focus on Islam as a case study and highlight the need for real-life cases to build a grounded theory. To this end, the essay documents the authors’ ongoing research on Islamic Public Value. We argue that to understand Public Administration in a global context, it is essential to recognize the limitations of a Western perspective, from which the dichotomy of religious versus secular emerged, and in so doing, consider alternative departure points, i.e. paradigms incorporating religious or semi-religious elements

The Qualitative Shift in European Integration: Towards permanent wage pressures and a ‘Latin-Americanization’ of Europe?

US economist Hyman Minsky jokingly used to claim that there are as many varieties of capitalism as Heinz has pickles, that is 57 varieties (Minsky 1991). In this paper we argue that economic integration provides a similar analytical problem: economic integration can take many forms, and some are more conducive to wealth and freedom than others. Colonialism was probably the first form of international economic integration, and a very close form of integration at that. Intuitively we understand that what the European Union has attempted to achieve – ever since Winston Churchill called for ‘a kind of United States of Europe’ in a 1946 Zurich University speech – is something qualitatively very different from colonialism. In this paper we argue that European economic integration has made a qualitative shift from one type of economic integration to another, from a Listian symmetrical economic integration to an integrative and asymmetrical integration. We argue that this change – originating in a new definition of the nature of capitalism – is measurably threatening European welfare, first in the economic periphery and secondly potentially also in the core countries

Applying market shaping approaches to increase access to assistive technology in low- and middle-income countries

Development outcomes are inextricably linked to the health of the marketplace that delivers products and services to people in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Shortcomings in the market for assistive technology (AT) contribute to low access in LMIC. Market shaping is aimed at improving a market's specific outcomes, such as access to high quality, affordable AT, by targeting the root causes of these shortcomings. The paper summarizes the findings of market analyses conducted under the UK aid funded AT2030 programme in support of ATscale and aims to discuss how market shaping can help more people gain access to the AT that they need and what are the best mechanisms to unlock markets and commercial opportunity in LMICs. The paper also explores how market shaping for AT markets could be part of a mission-oriented approach AT policy. A mission-oriented approach can help accelerate progress toward a common objective among stakeholders, at country or global level. While market-shaping activities direct the outcomes of the market toward a specific end goal, such as access to quality, affordable products and services, missions are more comprehensive and include other policy interventions and stakeholder collaborations in order to create a robust and sustainable structure

SeeBridge Next Generation Bridge Inspection: Overview, Information Delivery Manual and Model View Definition

Innovative solutions for rapid and intelligent survey and assessment methods are required in maintenance, repair, retrofit and rebuild of enormous numbers of bridges in service throughout the world. Motivated by this need, a next-generation integrated bridge inspection system, called SeeBridge, has been proposed. An Information Delivery Manual (IDM) was compiled to specify the technical components, activities and information exchanges in the SeeBridge process, and a Model View Definition (MVD) was prepared to specify the data exchange schema to serve the IDM. The MVD was bound to the IFC4 Add2 data schema standard. The IDM and MVD support research and development of the system by rigorously defining the information and data that structure bridge engineers' knowledge. The SeeBridge process is mapped, parts of the data repositories are presented, and the future use of the IDM is discussed. The development underlines the real potential for automated inspection of infrastructure at large, because it demonstrates that the hurdles in the way of automated acquisition of detailed and semantically rich models of existing infrastructure are computational in nature, not instrumental, and are surmountable with existing technologies

Semantic Enrichment for Building Information Modeling: Procedure for Compiling Inference Rules and Operators for Complex Geometry

Semantic enrichment of building models adds meaningful domain-specific or application-specific information to a digital building model. It is applicable to solving interoperability problems and to compilation of models from point cloud data. The SeeBIM (Semantic Enrichment Engine for BIM) prototype software encapsulates domain expert knowledge in computer readable rules for inference of object types, identity and aggregation of systems. However, it is limited to axis-aligned bounding box geometry and the adequacy of its rule-sets cannot be guaranteed. This paper solves these drawbacks by (1) devising a new procedure for compiling inference rule sets that are known a priori to be adequate for complete and thorough classification of model objects, and (2) enhancing the operators to compute complex geometry and enable precise topological rule processing. The procedure for compiling adequate rule sets is illustrated using a synthetic concrete highway bridge model. A real-world highway bridge model, with 333 components of 13 different types and compiled from a laser scanned point cloud, is used to validate the approach and test the enhanced SeeBIM system. All of the elements are classified correctly, demonstrating the efficacy of the approach to semantic enrichment