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In many countries, the rapid evolution of digital platform technology has triggered significant shifts in competition law. Many have interpreted China's recent moves as signaling a broader crackdown on private entrepreneurship. In Russia, even before the invasion of Ukraine, government policy became increasingly restrictive toward foreign internet platforms. This paper analyzes the development and enforcement of competition law in Russia and China. We show that both technologically driven changes in the ability of digital platform firms to exercise market power and changes in the external political environment affect the relative strength and coalitions of interested bureaucratic actors and influence policy outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of the determinants of regional government debt in the Russian Federation using data from 2005–2017. We document that total indebtedness of Russian regions has grown substantially since 2010 and find significant changes in the structure of regional debt, primarily the increased use of budget credits offered by the federal government. Market debt instruments are determined by a different set of factors than non-market instruments. In fact, poorer and less fiscally independent regions have lower access to budget credits and are forced to rely on more expensive market debt instruments, particularly commercial loans. Budget credits and commercial loans are shown to be substitutes, although the nature of this substitution is contrary to declared redistributive goals of public policy. Finally, we find the presence of horizontal strategic interactions in debt issuance across Russian regions: regions react positively to increased debt issuance in the same federal district. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Great Tea Road (Wanli chadao) is a 13,000 km trade route that for two centuries connected Qing China and Tsarist Russia. It has been identified in recent years as an important category of China's route heritage. The rediscovery of the Great Tea Road, and other Chinese route heritage, is being framed in a 'mobility narrative', that is, a narrative that describes how mobility and exchange over space and time contribute to the formation of the Chinese nation or Zhonghua minzu. Since 2013 the Great Tea Road has been incorporated into the 'authorised mobility narrative' of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), and in particular to the BRI agreement linking China, Mongolia and Russia. In 2019 the Great Tea Road was placed on the China list for World Heritage application. This paper examines the rise of the Great Tea Road in contemporary China and describes the various actors that play a formative role in developing the narratives and policies associated with such route heritage. It finds that the Chinese combination of 'mobility narrative' and 'heritage bureaucracy' provides a discursive and institutional frame that is able to mobilise significant resources in the pursuit of cultural policy and heritage diplomacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ostensibly, Joe Biden's victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential elections should have placed United States international policy back on a familiar path. However, despite the prevalence of a highly traditional vision of US foreign policy, the Biden administration has maintained significant continuities with the previous administration, as reflected in the policy towards China and the withdrawal from Afghanistan. In part, this is due to the constraints produced by the deep divisions that exist at domestic level. This paper aims to unravel the fundamental elements of Biden's foreign policy, focusing on possible ideological and doctrinal elements, strategic priorities, and any continuities and changes relative to his predecessor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Life expectancy at birth has attracted interest in various fields, as a health indicator that measures the quality of life. Its appeal relies on the ability to enclose and summarize all the factors affecting longevity. However, more granular information, provided by social indicators such as cause-of-death mortality rates, plays a crucial role in defining appropriate policies for governments to achieve well-being and sustainability goals. Unfortunately, their availability is not always guaranteed. Exploiting the relationship between life expectancy at birth and cause-of-death mortality rates, in this paper we propose an indirect model to produce estimates of death rates due to specific causes using the summary indicator of life expectancy at birth, thus the general levels of the observed mortality. By leveraging on a constrained optimization procedure, we ensure a robust framework where the cause-specific mortality rates are coherent to the aggregate mortality. The main advantage is that indirect estimations allow us to overcome the data availability problem: very often the cause-specific mortality data are incomplete, whereas data on the aggregate mortality are not. Using data from the Human Cause-of-Death Database, we show a numerical application of our model to two different countries, Russia and Spain, which have experienced a different evolution of life expectancy and different leading causes of death. In Spain, we detected the impact of several public health policies on the lowered levels of cancer deaths and related life expectancy increases. As regards the Russia, our results catch the effects of the anti-alcohol campaign of 1985–1988 on longevity changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of forests in national climate policies of two countries very rich in woods: Russia and Canada. Canada has made efforts to reduce direct CO2 emissions in the national economy, intensify forestry, and increase greenhouse gas sequestration by forests. Russia focuses on the verification and recalculation of the carbon sequestration capacity of its forests. Analysis of the Russian and Canadian stationary models used to assess the carbon sequestration capacity of forests (ROBUL and CBM-CFS, respectively) shows that both the Canadian model and the Russian one derived from it reflect the stationary dynamics of forest stands, which inevitably results in a downward CO2 absorption trend. Even if the forest inventory is updated on a regular basis, the predictive components of such models are unable to take into account the variability of forest ecosystems and their adaptation to climate change. Models that describe global carbon fluxes (e.g., ones using FLUXNET and remote sensing data) provide significantly higher net carbon sequestration values and indicate a nondecreasing net carbon accumulation trend in forests. It is concluded that stationary and remote sensing models should be used together to assess net carbon sequestration and formulate key principles of national climate policies in countries rich in forests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]