2003. Vol. 4. No. 4

Informal economy is a leader for the scientific discourse. The number of publications on the topic is growing like a snowball. At the same time the borders of this term remain undefined as well as its internal structure. That fact that this term is well-known let people use it rather easily. But the term has its own history that makes us understand it and correlate with the established traditions. It is obvious that the direct transfer of the definitions and meanings is not a good thing. Informal economy – the term of world science however its conceptualization has a lot of national versions. Scientists from the Western countries underline different qualitative characteristics of informal economic order with comparison to the scientists from the transition countries. This puts a challenging issue of systematization of the approaches to the definition of informal economy and at the same time it puts the task of working out the conceptual scheme of informal economy in Russia.

The credit system has been developing very actively during the last 2-3 years in Russia. However only a few Russians have the experience of getting a consumer credit from the state or a private bank. The object of the study is the adult population of 18 years and more living in the big cities in Russia. The subject of the research is the people preferences toward the debt and credit behavior of the population. The goal of the study is to analyze the current credit behavior in order to identify main preferences toward debt and to estimate the perspectives for future development of the credit system in Russia. The data source is the flat questionnaire of households collected in 2002 in 5 Russian key big cities: Moscow, Samara, Yekaterinburg, Krasnodar and Pskov.     

Here by the main part of the « Introducing Economic Sociology» is given. This is the introduction paper to the most famous nowadays reader on economic sociology – «The Handbook of Economic Sociology» (1994). This text gives the definition of the economic sociology, as well as the comparison of the economic sociology and the mainstream economics. This paper also provides the analysis of such issues as term of actor, term of economic action, limits of economic action, and relation of economics toward society. The authors compare goals, methods and intellectual traditions of the discussed approaches.  

Radical economic reforms of the last 10 years led to the intensive social and economic diversification of the Russian population. The consequences of this could be seen in forming incompatible interests of the “top” and the “bottom”, “ghettoization” of big groups of people on the lowest levels of the social structure without any perspectives for the better in future. Social polarization stems from the cumulative character of the social processes. The authors claim that Russia is at the begging of the spontaneous process of the accumulating advantages and deepening deprivation in the society as a whole. The paper provides the analysis of the probability of the empirical study. The factors of the growing inequality as well as the factors that block the social polarization are under focus. 

The author analyzes the influence of the income uncertainty on the individual choice of a life strategy on example of the decision taken about the dwelling purchase or rent a flat. The author claims that this choice has strong correlation with the overall principles of behavior, as well as with the choice for the strategy in professional, emotional, personal and other type of development.