2003. Vol. 4. No. 5

The logic of the paper is based on the thesis that the key questions for today Russian economic policy are the following: who can support the reforms and who can provide the stable economic growth as well as what mechanisms allow us to consolidate and motivate these social groups? With the help of critical analysis of the mass former studies the author shows that economic, social and political deformations that were accumulated during the Soviet period greatly predetermined the character of the elites’ transformation and the trajectory of the reforms in 1990s.  

The range of types of the informal economic activity is rather wide and continuously growing. It is a unique example of the invasion of the social forces into the world of the economic transactions. The paper gives the history of the term of “informal economy” and its definitions. The main attention is paid to those aspects of informal economy which let include it into the sphere of the sociological analysis. 

The paper deals with the business networks of the “shuttle-traders” that operate on the Russian-Chinese border. With the help of the examples of Blagoveshchensk and Hihe the author analyses the specificity of the new transboundary localalities which appear on the states’ borders. The author tries to understand how the everyday economic practices of local “shuttle-traders” influence the organization of social and economic space. The research is based on the qualitative methods. 

The main goal of the paper is to identify the impact of the educational level on the type of the inter-firm workers mobility. The basic assumption is that the level of education strongly influences the labour market segmentation that is why the education should have certain impact on the type of the workers’ mobility. The data analysis based on RLMS gives the contradictory results. On the one hand the level of education determines the chances to be unemployed or non-active. On the other hand the level of education has impact on the probability of the inter-firm workers’ mobility only for males of 22-45 years old. Moreover upward mobility in terms of wages was true only for man but the level of education was not significant for this.