Search results

The purpose of this article is to analyze the present state of employee ownership in Russia and reasons for its decline due to the drawbacks of economic reforms on the country.

The design of the article includes the analysis of the Russian model of ESOP and its differences from the U.S. analog. The author also describes the practical experience of the Russian people’s enterprises and the drawbacks in the legal foundations of their work.

The key finding of this work is that the correction of these drawbacks would lead to broader development of employee owned companies in Russia.

The author’s ideas of changing focus of the market reforms in Russia and facilitating the development of economic democracy in the country constitute the major social implication of her research.

It may have practical implications both for developed market economies and economies in transition.

The originality of the paper is determined by drawing a logical link between the development of employee ownership and overall market reform in Russia, as well as by presenting a comparative analysis of the U.S. and Russian models of ESOP.

They never stop! House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt joined by the newly elected in congress continue their opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement. When are these caretakers of the public trust going to get it? One day we hear that aid for Russia will insure that a rich, free long‐term market develops for American goods to benefit us all, and the next day we hear negatives about how the free trade pact with Mexico will kidnap jobs from America. These noisy complainers must have descended from the folks that preached misery when the agrarian age ended in 1775 and they refused the challenge of coping with change brought about by the industrial revolution. More than 200 years later, we again hear a familiar chorus of the ever defiant, resisting change, and excusing their failure to understand or cope by censuring the free trade pact with Mexico.

The purpose of this paper was to examine the relationship between image, service satisfaction and public opinion towards reforms in public organizations and postulate a more detailed relationship among them. The concept “New Public Management” (NPM) was initially suggested in the literature sometime around the early 1990s (Aucoin, 1990; Hood, 1991). NPM-style reforms raised the flag of responsiveness to citizens and improved public satisfaction with the assumption that organizational image would also be positively affected by such reforms. Image, satisfaction and support in public sector reforms are, therefore, the major focus of this study.

The focus is on a major reform in the Israel electricity industry and data were collected from 500 respondents by telephone interviews.

The findings support the authors ' hypotheses concerning the major role of image and satisfaction in forming attitudes towards NPM-style reforms. However, beyond conventional direct effects, the authors point to the mediating effect of organizational image on the relationship between satisfaction and support for reforms.

First, other factors not included in the model may influence support for NPM-style reforms in public organizations. Second, the study focused on a single organization in one country only and a very specific culture. Finally, the study is cross-sectional and may suffer from common-method and common-source biases and for this reason, should be replicated to allow better generalization and firmer implications.

The findings about the preponderance of organizational image over service satisfaction can contribute to policymakers in their efforts to increase support for reforms among the public. The results demonstrate the strong relationship between organizational image and public opinion towards reform and the secondary effect of service satisfaction.

The centrality of organizational image as a core social focus for citizens as clients and for policymakers is highlighted in the discussion. It is maintained that NPM-style reforms in the social arena, and beyond, are predominantly affected by image. Therefore, there is a need to better understand how image affects social and economic reforms and attitudes towards those reforms and what may be the social consequences of such attitudes by citizens and by policymakers’ decisions.

The originality of this study is fourfold: a unique model of image, satisfaction and attitudes towards NPM-style reforms not been studied thus far is in its current form; exploring interrelations of citizens’ satisfaction, image of the public sector and calls for reforms and change in the market-like environment of the public sphere; a telephone survey of opinions towards a specific NPM-style reform; and a focus on a major public sector organization in Israel going through reform.

The purpose of the paper is to analyse the prevalence and effectiveness of methods and strategies for job searches amongst recent graduates of Russian universities.

The empirical analysis is carried out on data from the Russian Graduate Survey 2016, which is representative of individuals graduating during 2010–2015. The sample included 12,370 individuals. The empirical approach combined standard descriptive statistics, factor and regression analysis (multiple logit regression).

Results show that the most common strategies are a combined strategy that involves the use of formal and informal methods, as well as “pure” informal strategies – applying to relatives and friends or contacting employers. The most effective strategies are job searches with the help of relatives and friends, by contacting employers and with the help of educational organisations. The choice of job search strategy is determined by the expected return in terms of the likelihood of finding a job.

The paper increases understanding of graduate job search behaviour. The results can be used by multiple stakeholders in higher education to better prepare students for job seeking.

This research, based on a large field survey of recent university graduates, provides the first estimates of use of job search strategies and their effectiveness for Russian university graduates.

Markets are a particular form of social organization in which exchanges are regularized. Capitalist markets are those in which: (1) most things traded are commodities, that is they are “identical” for purposes of sale (Appadurai, 1986); and (2) there exists a class of people for whom the end goal of selling in the market is not to buy goods but to “make money” (Marx, 1967 [1867]). Today, nearly everyone in the world lives in some form capitalist market society.

Russia's size – both in terms of population and geography, spanning 11 time zones, 89 oblasts (states or regions) and autonomous republics and its privatization program, encompassing some 100,000 small-scale enterprises, 25,000 medium to large firms, and 300 or so of its largest firms, made its privatization program the largest sale/transfer of assets conducted among the transition economies, with the possible exception of China. Comparisons by many of the program's critics, and there are many, to Poland, Hungary, or the Czech republic are invidious, especially the latter two countries whose populations are similar to just that of greater Moscow.

An important objective of corporate governance reforms is to increase transparency. The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether this objective of corporate governance reforms of 2002 was achieved in Russia.

This paper utilizes the data collected from UBS Brunswick's “Russian Equity Guides” published during 1999‐2004, and companies’ annual reports. The modified accrual model of Jones presented by Dechow et al. is used to ascertain the quality of reported earnings of 91 Russian listed companies during the pre‐ and post‐ reform periods.

This research paper shows that the quality of earnings – measured as the inverse of absolute discretionary accruals – is not affected by the 2002 reforms in Russia. Therefore, one of the most important objectives of bringing transparency in the Russian corporate sector was not successfully achieved. Instead, this paper finds that adoption of international financial reporting standards (IAS/USGAAP) by Russian listed companies improved the transparency of corporate disclosures irrespective of the reforms. Moreover, the need for large capital investments after the Russian financial crisis of 1998 was depicted by maintaining large pools of accruals by Russian listed companies. Finally, the results show ferrous metal and telecom sector companies have generally lower quality of earnings than other sectors.

This paper builds on the previous accounting literature by studying the determinants of the quality of reported earnings in one of the most interesting emerging economies. The study re‐emphasizes the importance of legal and regulatory framework in determining the level of corporate transparency in emerging economies. The results obtained here are insightful for future accounting research and policy makers in assessing the potential pros and cons of regulatory reforms. However, the paper does not judge or comment on the quality and enforcement of the prescribed reforms. The results describe the trend of the accounting quality in Russia during the analysis period only.

This is one of the first studies on Russian listed firms testing the impacts of the most important of all reforms introduced in Russia since the fall of the USSR. This extends the knowledge not only for academics and investors but for Russian policy makers in particular and for corporate regulators in other emerging markets in general.

Attempts to discover an internal logic in the high‐speed events taking place in the former Soviet Union. In addressing the problems of the country′s disintegration, examines the issue in its socioeconomic, political and territorial‐administrative aspects. Analyses, for this purpose, the nature of Soviet society prior to Gorbachev′s reforms, its present transitional stage and its probable direction in the near future.

This chapter is intended to provide the reader with information and insights on the transition or transformation from socialism to a market economy in what are generally termed the transition economies. This includes countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), sometimes referred to as the Former Soviet Union (FSU), the South East European (SEE) countries, sometimes referred to as the Balkans and the major socialist economy of Asia, China. The chapter covers the critical years of reform for most of these countries, from 1990 to 2000. Some transition economies started reforming earlier, such as China which has continued state-owned enterprise (SOE) reforms to the present time. Other transition countries, primarily the SEE economies, lagged due to the conflict which raged throughout most of the region and the period of isolation which followed, particularly for Serbia. China and Serbia are sui generis for a number of reasons. They will be referenced as examples in this chapter, but they will not form part of the core statistical and data analysis.