Tag «expertise»

Times of Crisis and Opportunity is the title of the OECD Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) Outlook published in January. The document focuses on STI responses to the pandemic while assessing the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on science and technology. Mikhail Gershman, Deputy Director of the Centre of Science, Technology, Innovation and Information Policy, discusses the contribution of the Institute of Statistical Studies and Economics of Knowledge (ISSEK) to the Outlook and discusses some aspects of ISSEK’s long-standing partnership with OECD.

More than a hundred countries have already declared the achievement of ‘zero emissions with the exception of absorption’ to be their primary goal in the fight against climate change. For Russia, whose primary export is fossil fuels, the global rejection of hydrocarbons poses great risks. Experts discussed the issue at the research seminar, ‘Decarbonization as a Global Trend: Changing the Economic Landscape and Its Importance for Companies’, which was jointly organized by HSE University and the Association of European Businesses.

An applied research project being carried out by the HSE Laboratory for Economics of Climate Change uses the example of the Chechen Republic and the mountainous areas of Krasnodar Krai to create a model of climate risk evaluation and management for Russian regions. Laboratory heads Igor Makarov and Ilya Stepanov talk about the threats presented by global climate change, about whether the pandemic will slow it down, and why a multifaceted approach is essential.

As the situation with COVID-19 has shown, mistakes associated with insufficiently developed policy measures in medicine, science, education and other socially significant sectors of the economy are very costly for society. In the July issue of Nature, Leonid Gokhberg, First Vice Rector of HSE University and ISSEK Director, discussed the topic of the growing practice of making management decisions based on big data analysis.

HSE experts have analyzed the position of Russian non-commodity sectors in global production and opportunities for their revitalization. The researchers believe that long-term sustainable growth of its non-commodity exports can be achieved by repositioning and including them in the global value chain at some more advanced stages than the supply of raw materials and semi-finished products.

The bio-economy encompasses the production of renewable biological resources and their conversion into food, energy, goods, and services. Alexander Chulok, Head of the HSE ISSEK Centre of Scientific and Technological Forecasts, spoke to RBK and shared his predictions for the development of the bio-economy in the context of 13 global trends.

HSE University’s Centre of Development Institute has conducted its regular quarterly survey of experts’ projections for the Russian economy in the 2020–2021 period. According to the consensus forecast, Russia’s GDP will decrease by 4.3% this year. This seems to be a more optimistic outlook compared, for example, to the IMF’s forecast, which suggests a 5.5% decline.

In a recent report, HSE experts evaluated the world’s 14 countries hit hardest by the COVID-19 pandemic based on data (including the number of recorded deaths) from May 1, 2020 or later. The report also examined 16 other countries whose experience was considered significant. While refraining from making generalizations, experts nonetheless noted that leaders in Europe and the United States have generally not responded to the situation as effectively as their Asian counterparts. Africa, meanwhile, follows its own course, while the situation in Brazil is worse.