Life expectancy among Russians has been increasing over recent decades. However this is more recovery than growth – making up for previous declines. Mortality rates fell in the same areas that previously accounted for their growth in the late 20th, early 21st centuries – cardiovascular disease, and external causes of death: murder, suicide, alcohol poisoning and car accidents, according to senior academic researchers at the HSE’s Institute of Demography Evgeny Andreev, Ekaterina Kvasha, and Tatyana Kharkova.
For the first time since the 2010 heat wave in Moscow, demographers have estimated the effects of abnormal heat, wildfires and air pollution on morbidity and mortality. Extreme heat in Moscow in the summer of 2010 caused nearly 11,000 additional deaths from diseases of the nervous and cardiovascular systems and respiratory and kidney conditions, according to a group of researchers including Tatyana Kharkova and Ekaterina Kvasha of the HSE Institute of Demography, members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, MosEconomMonitoring, and Swedish researchers.
On December 9, as part of a seminar run by the HSE’s Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology, there was an opportunity to meet Kyungmin Baek, new Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences, School of Sociology, who joined HSE in September 2014. In a report about South Korean firms’ comprehensive adoption of the ISO 14001 environmental standard, Baek explained how businesses’ motivation has changed.
Middle-aged Russians whose younger years fell in the era of change fear for their future and tend to save more money than they spend. In contrast, Russia's elderly and young adults are avid consumers: the former have survived hardship and scarcity – potential loss does not scare them, while the latter share the inherent optimism of youth, according to the paper 'Consumer Expectations of the Russian Public (1996-2009): Interconnections across Cohorts, Generations, and Ages' by Dilyara Ibragimova, Senior Researcher at the HSE's Laboratory for Studies in Economic Sociology.
An article by Andrei Melville, Denis Stukal and Mikhail Mironyuk ‘King of the Mountain’, or Why Postcommunist Autocracies Have Bad Institutions’ was published in the U.S. journal Russian Politics and Law (vol. 52, no. 2, March-April 2014, pp. 7-29).
