Encouraging entrepreneurship, providing social support services and helping people find jobs are all part of a new ‘social contract’ programme introduced across Russia to assist poor families in becoming financially self-sufficient. Using formal contracts to encourage low-income people to engage in economic activity is proving to be more effective than welfare handouts, according to researchers of the HSE Centre for Studies of Income and Living Standards.
Over the past two decades, the average life expectancy in Russia has increased by 2.3 years for women and 1.4 years for men, according to a recently published paper based on the WHO's Global Burden of Disease (GBD) assessment – a major epidemiological study by a group of international experts, including Vasily Vlassov, Professor of the HSE Department of Health Care Administration and Economy.
The book ‘Democracy in a Russian Mirror’ edited by Adam Przeworski was issued by Cambridge University Press in May 2015. Three of the authors — Boris Makarenko, Andrei Melville and Mikhail Ilyin — are staff members of the School of Political Science.
Overall, Russians tend to be satisfied with their country's health care system, particularly when they do not need to deal with it; however, those with recent first-hand experience of healthcare often complain about the lack of professionalism and the decline in free medical services, according to Sergey Shishkin, Head of HSE's Department of Health Care Administration and Economy, and Natalia Kochkina and Marina Krasilnikova, sociologists with the Levada Centre, in their paper Health Care Service Availability and Quality as Assessed by the Russian Public.
Emigration from Russia has changed significantly over the last decade. The potential for ethnic repatriation has almost been exhausted, but other factors have become stronger in the population outflow, such as reunion with families and trips for education. Such emigration is largely determined by differences in the quality of life and policies in host countries, which welcome young, educated, qualified people with a certain level of income, said Mikhail Denisenko, Deputy Director of the HSE Institute of Demography, in his presentation at the XVI April International Academic Conference at HSE.
Migrants from Central Asia in Moscow are often involved in hard physical work and live in bad conditions, both of which affect their health. But the access to medical aid is complicated for them due to their social isolation. As a result, foreign labourers use alternative strategies of therapy: from self-treatment, which is fraught with exacerbating the condition, to going to private ‘ethnic’ clinics. Daniil Kashnitsky, Assistant Researcher at the HSE Institute for Social Development Studies (ISDS), analyzed the medical aid for migrants in the Russian capital.
International companies engage in social responsibility in order to to improve their reputation, be more competitive, and to gain political benefits and some degree of control over society. In Russia, however, businesses convert social investment into informal privileges granted to them by government, according to a paper by Olga Kuzina, Professor of the HSE Department of Economic Sociology, and Marina Chernysheva, postgraduate student at the same department.
Young Russians are in no hurry to start living on their own. The age of moving out from the parental home has increased from 18-20 for previous generations to 23-25 for today's youth. Instead, young people are spending more time in search of themselves and taking longer to get an education and choose a partner, according to a study by Ekaterina Mitrofanova, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE Institute of Demography, and Alina Dolgova, student at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences.
On April 16-19, O. B. Khoreva, who is an Associate Professor and the Deputy Head of the School of Public Administration’s Department for Spatial Development and Regional Studies, along with V. I. Smorchkova, a Professor at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration and the head of the programme for preparing management personnel for the North and Arctic, took a trip to the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District as part of our Macarthur Foundation Grant ‘Governance, Community and Ecology: Responding to Challenges of Resource Development in the Circumpolar North.’
These results were obtained in a nationwide survey of 1,500 Russians over 18 years of age as part of a Monitoring the Status of Civil Society study conducted by the HSE Centre for Studies of Civil Society and Nonprofit Sector.
