The Soviet Economic Crisis: Steps to Avert Collapse

This report was drafted by members of IIASA's Economic Reform and Integration Project in cooperation with Eugeny Yasin, department chief of the USSR State Commission on Economic Reform and Petr Aven, a Soviet economist and IIASA Scholar. By mid-December this report, which takes account of developments through fall 1990, was in the hands of Soviet leaders. Regardless of its impact on Soviet policy, it deserves study by anyone interested in expert views on the transition from central planning to a market economy -- a process now underway in many countries and of importance to us all

High Technology and Industrial Policy

My assigned title is so broad that it does not trouble my conscience to limit the topic. One limitation is geographic. I will deal only with five countries -- the United States, Japan, the Federal Republic of Germany, the United Kingdom, and France. They are countries I know a bit more about than others, but a more scholarly justification is that these five countries account for 85 percent of the R&D in the 21 OECD countries. Among these 21, the five also are the most R&D intensive as measured by the ratio of R&D expenditures to GNP with the exception of Sweden, Switzerland, and the Netherlands

What Is To Be Done? Proposals for the Soviet Transition to the Market

This important book presents a bold plan for converting the failing economy of the Soviet Union or its constituent republics to a functioning market economy. Its authors describe the essential logic of the institutions of a market economy and show how these institutions are dependent on one another. They argue persuasively for their drastic and simultaneous reform within the Soviet system either at the central or republican level. Written at the request of Soviet economists and with their participation, the book is fascinating reading for anyone who wishes to understand the worsening economic crisis in the Soviet Union and the reasons why a rapid move to the market would be beneficial and how it can be obtained. Written before the amazing events of August 1991, the proposals in this book were devised for the Union. Even though new problems now emerge, these recommendations still apply as economic reform is implemented primarily by the Republics

Russian Applied Research and Development: Its Problems and its Promise

This Research Report discusses the changing nature of research and development (R&D) in Russia. In the decades following World War II, the USSR was one of the two great powers in R&D; the other was the USA. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, the R&D sector went into a precipitous decline that continued until at least 1995. The collection of papers in this report addresses what went wrong. A number of broad issues are covered, such as whether the decline of the R&D sector from 1991 to 1995 was too steep or too modest for the welfare of the Russian economy; how the structure and organization of Russian-applied R&D should be developed over the long term; and what role government policy should play in Russian-applied R&D. Chapters in the report were written by Russian senior officials and by scholars of R&D policy from outside Russia

Economic Reform & Integration Project (ERI) of the Technology, Economy & Society (TES) Program

In summer 1989 IIASA was approached by Academician S. Shatalin of the Soviet Union with the request to consider establishing an activity that could analyze international economic interdependencies and serve as a scientific forum to support economic reforms in the Soviet Union and the other socialist Member countries of our Institute. In late 1989, the Economic Reform and Integration (ERI) Project was established with the general aim of establishing bridges between eastern and western economic theory and practice, creating conditions for mutually assimilating successful managerial experience, and for possible rapprochement of economic systems. This paper presents the current status of the IIASA ERI Project

International Trade Issues of the Russian Federation

Trade and capital flows between Russia and the rest of the world are now significant for both partners. The economic reforms introduced in Russia since 1991 have converted an autarkic, highly regulated economy into a relatively open one. The dramatic change followed from the abolition of central planning and complex exchange rate controls as Yeltsin came to power in Russia and the Soviet Union collapsed. Yet the years since 1991 are not simply a record of tearing down trade barriers. Instead Russia's role in the international economy appears to be erratic and inconsistent. Also the transformation of earlier inter-republic deliveries between former republics of the Soviet Union to trade between independent states implied the sometimes controversial establishment of new trade barriers. The country's struggle to develop a viable trade policy provides unique insights into the consequences of the conflicts of economic ideas: free trade versus protectionism; rewards for economic efficiency versus social equity; and macroeconomic stability versus maintaining employment. The clash among policy proposals has been reflected in political struggles, for the decisions on these matters have an impact on the lives of the 179 million Russians. The topic of this volume -- International Trade Issues of the Russian Federation -- is a key issue in Russia's transition to a market system and its integration into the world economy. Since 1990, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) has had a project on Russia's economic problems. The project has organized a series of conferences. The papers that make up this volume are from a conference held in May 1994 in Laxenburg, Austria. The conference was on Russia's international trade issues, aside from its ties to the republics of the former Soviet Union, a topic of a 1993 conference

Training telescope operators and support astronomers at Paranal

The operations model of the Paranal Observatory relies on the work of efficient staff to carry out all the daytime and nighttime tasks. This is highly dependent on adequate training. The Paranal Science Operations department (PSO) has a training group that devises a well-defined and continuously evolving training plan for new staff, in addition to broadening and reinforcing courses for the whole department. This paper presents the training activities for and by PSO, including recent astronomical and quality control training for operators, as well as adaptive optics and interferometry training of all staff. We also present some future plans.Comment: Paper 9910-123 presented at SPIE 201

Responding to the Event Deluge

We present the VOEventNet infrastructure for large-scale rapid follow-up of astronomical events, including selection, annotation, machine intelligence, and coordination of observations. The VOEvent standard is central to this vision, with distributed and replicated services rather than centralized facilities. We also describe some of the event brokers, services, and software that are connected to the network. These technologies will become more important in the coming years, with new event streams from Gaia, LOFAR, LIGO, LSST, and many others.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of SPIE Observatory Operations, Amsterdam, 2012 July 2-

Governing the anthropocene: agency, governance, knowledge

The growing body of literature on the idea of the Anthropocene has opened up serious questions that go to the heart of the social and human sciences. There has been as yet no satisfactory theoretical framework for the analysis of the Anthropocene debate in the social and human sciences. The notion of the Anthropocene is not only a condition in which humans have become geologic agents, thus signalling a temporal shift in Earth history: it can be seen as a new object of knowledge and an order of governance. A promising direction for theorizing in the social and human science is to approach the notion of the Anthropocene as exemplified in new knowledge practices that have implications for governance. It invokes new conceptions of time, agency, knowledge and governance. The Anthropocene has become a way in which the human world is re-imagined culturally and politically in terms of its relation with the Earth. It entails a cultural model, that is an interpretative category by which contemporary societies make sense of the world as embedded in the Earth, and articulate a new kind of historical self-understanding, by which an alternative order of governance is projected. This points in the direction of cosmopolitics – and thus of a ‘Cosmopolocene’ – rather than a geologization of the social or in the post-humanist philosophy, the end of the human condition as one marked by agency

Compact jets as probes for sub-parsec scale regions in AGN

Compact relativistic jets in active galactic nuclei offer an effective tool for investigating the physics of nuclear regions in galaxies. The emission properties, dynamics, and evolution of jets in AGN are closely connected to the characteristics of the central supermassive black hole, accretion disk and broad-line region in active galaxies. Recent results from studies of the nuclear regions in several active galaxies with prominent outflows are reviewed in this contribution.Comment: AASLaTeX, 5 pages, 4 figures. Accepted in Astrophysics and Space Scienc