Smart Villages: IoT Technology Based Transformation

In recent years, large-scale urbanisation has been on the rise with cities being the hubs for growth, but rural business continues to play an important role in any country’s overall development. A recent report reveals that almost 69 percent of India’s population resides in their villages, accounting for almost 50 percent of the nation’s GDP. This agricultural region varies from small towns with less than 500 residents to small towns. There are also similar situations in western nations. Despite their economic contribution, smaller villages seem to earn fewer in terms of infrastructural expenditure. The major problems addressed in these small towns include shortage of adequate public transit, emergency care and limited knowledge on federal subsidies for rural areas. Our vision is to expand the Smart city to Smart village by allowing use of recent technical advances and giving more attention to the problems in rural areas. The approach in this chapter is to bring IoT technology to Villages by literally showing a network of linked sensors and knowledge dissemination devices, controlling energy use and ensuring infrastructure protection. It gives a wide-ranging vision of enhancing the standard of living in villages and encourages them to meet the essential needs of domestic villagers.

Consolidated Budgets of the Subjects of the Russian Federation in the First Half of 2021: is the Crisis Ended?

In the first half of 2021, positive trends in the economy led to a pronounced increase in revenues of the consolidated budgets of RF subjects. Corporate income tax and personal income tax receipts increased most significantly. In most subjects of the Russian Federation, this year’s revenue growth has compensated for last year’s drop, but in a number of regions whose economies have a raw material orientation, the 2019 pre-crisis year indicators have not yet been exceeded. The total amount of the federal transfers remained practically at the level of 2020. At the same time, the structure of this aid has changed significantly. Unconditional grants receipts have decreased and subsidy receipts have increased significantly. The growth of expenditures of sub-federal budgets lags behind the dynamics of revenues, ensuring a pronounced budget surplus. The main areas of spending remain social policy, education and the national economy. Federal subsidies account for a significant portion of the increase in spending on social policy. The high growth rate of expenditures on the national economy is largely ensured by one subject of the Russian Federation Moscow. Health care spending, which grew ahead of schedule in 2020, has declined this year, but remained above precrisis 2019 levels. While in general all subjects of the Russian Federation executed their consolidated budgets in the first half of the year with a surplus, in a number of regions there is a budget deficit. In several regions, the surplus values turned out to be very significant due to the growth of income, which was not predicted.

Inflation Expectations and Risk Premia in Emerging Bond Markets: Evidence from Mexico

Can we reduce the damage from climate change by investing in seawalls, stilts, or other forms of adaptation? Focusing on the case of severe storms in the US, I develop a macro heterogeneous-agent model to quantify the interactions between adaptation, federal disaster policy, and climate change. The model departs from the standard climate damage function and incorporates the damage from storms as the realization of idiosyncratic shocks. I find that while the moral hazard effects from disaster aid reduce adaptation in the US economy, federal subsidies for investment in adaptation more than correct for the moral hazard. I introduce climate change into the model as a permanent increase in either or both the severity or probability of storms. Adaptation reduces the damage from this climate change by approximately one third. Finally, I show that modeling the idiosyncratic risk component of climate damage has quantitatively important implications for adaptation and for the welfare cost of climate change.

Ethanol

This chapter examines the use of biomass to make ethanol, or bioethanol, as a transportation fuel. Biomass is defined as any organic material that can be used as a fuel. However, in the United States and Brazil, the two countries that dominate the bioethanol market, most ethanol is produced from corn grain (United States) or sugarcane (Brazil). There has also been research and some commercial trials using cellulosic material, such as corn stover, switchgrass, and sugarcane bagasse, to produce ethanol, but the approach is hindered by high capital and operating costs. In the United States, more than 35% of the total corn production goes towards ethanol production and ethanol makes up about 10% of the gasoline market. Since 2007, the gallons of ethanol produced has more than doubled, and much of this growth has been driven by federal subsidies and mandates.

Social policy of the regions: Reducing poverty among families with children and stimulating fertility

Subject. This article analyzes the differentiation of the subjects of the Russian Federation in terms of fertility and material well-being of average-revenue families with children, and considers maternal capital as a regions' social policy aspect. Objectives. The article intends to justify the priorities of the Russian Federation subjects' social policy in the context of the expansion of federal subsidies for multiple-child families, based on an analysis of the relationship between the well-being of families and fertility. It also aims to develop general recommendations for groups of actors to improve social policy in the face of budgetary constraints. Methods. For the study, I used general scientific, economics and statistics methods of research. Results. Combining the subjects of the Russian Federation in eight clusters, close in birth rate and material well-being of families, the article offers general recommendations on the choice of priorities of regional social policy. The article shows that maternal capital gets transformed into a lump-sum benefit to support the current revenues of low-income families. Conclusions. To secure demographic increase, maternal capital must be paid from the Federal budget at the birth (adoption) of each child in the family without additional conditions, regardless of the region of residence. The eradication of poverty among families with children and support for multi-child parenting should be key priorities of the social policy of the regions.

Innovation institutions and the opioid crisis†

The US has recently—and belatedly—come to recognize opioid addiction as a public health crisis. What has gone mostly unrecognized is the degree to which this crisis is intertwined with US intellectual property law and related elements of US innovation policy. Innovation institutions—the legal arrangements that structure incentives for production and allocation of knowledge goods—encouraged the development and commercialization of addictive painkillers, restricted access to opioid antidotes, and (perhaps most importantly) failed to facilitate investments in alternative, nonaddictive treatments for chronic pain. Although innovation policy does not bear all the blame for the opioid wave that has washed over communities across the country, innovation institutions are bound up in the ongoing epidemic to a degree that so far has gone underappreciated. This article examines the proliferation of opioid use and abuse through the lens of innovation policy, and it envisions ways in which innovation institutions could help to contain the crisis. Along the way, it seeks to derive broader lessons for innovation policy scholarship as well as recommendations for institutional reform. The opioid crisis challenges the conventional understanding of IP law as a trade-off between allocative efficiency and dynamic efficiency; it highlights the potentially pernicious role of IP protection for addictive and habit-forming products; and it exposes deep flaws in the structure of federal subsidies for and regulation of prescription drugs. It also draws attention to the political and cultural factors that contribute to innovation policy failures. Ultimately, the opioid crisis underscores both the urgency and the limits of institutional change in the innovation policy domain.

POTENTIAL OF REGIONAL BONDS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF THE ALTAI TERRITORY

The development of the subjects of the Russian Federation is not possible without financial resources. Altai Territory is traditionally a highly subsidized region. Currently, it is ranked 4th in terms of federal subsidies. Now, the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation orients the subjects of the federation towards increasing the independence and efficiency of functioning. The Central Bank of Russia is intensifying its bond issues and sees in this direction an effective way of replacing credit resources and bill circulation in the coming years. Currently, there are no comprehensive methods for generating informed decisions on the issue of sub-federal bonds. The purpose of this study is to formulate a method for making an informed decision on the issue of sub-federal bonds, based on an assessment of their potential. To achieve this purpose, the methods of economic and system analysis, synthesis, synthesis, empirical methods, methods of abstraction and analogies were used. The main results of the study include: forecasting changes in the Russian bond market in the future based on a comprehensive assessment of the Russian ruble bond market; a critical assessment of the effectiveness of the use of bond instruments by constituent entities of the Russian Federation, the author’s proposed system of key indicators that allow an objective assessment of the potential of sub-federal bonds, as well as a method for forming a reasonable decision on the timeliness and feasibility of issuing bonds by a subject of the federation. The proposed method was tested on the example of the Altai Territory.