Suchergebnisse

In economic research, much attention is traditionally paid to the issues of trade and economic cooperation between states and the development of international trade. This kind of research is based on the materials of official statistics of countries and international organizations, which are not always published on a comparable basis, making it difficult, and sometimes impossible to do an objective analysis of processes taking place both in bilateral economic relations and in international trade in general. The article deals with this important problem of comparability of statistical sources.Using a large amount of factual and statistical material, the authors trace the changes that have occurred in world trade relations of the 21st century, paying special attention to the post-crisis period, they reveal the main features of the geographical and commodity structure of trade, they present a comparative analysis of the rates of development of world exports and imports by groups of countries, assess Russia's participation in international trade, and also demonstrate the methodological content of the main statistical indicators that are used to characterize foreign economic relations.For many decades, international cooperation in the field of statistics has focused on the problem of unifying information on the foreign economic activity of countries. Solving this problem, the UN Statistical Commission has drawn up methodological documents, which are usually called "international statistical standards". Based on the study of these documents, as well as materials of official statistics of countries and other primary sources, the authors characterize the process of international standardization of information on foreign economic relations of countries. The article presents a critical analysis of the key provisions of the latest methodological standards of statistics, considers the practice of their application in countries, including the Russian Federation, identifies the main achievements and problems in this area.

9/11 has reinforced the discursive securitization of migration and integration politics and policies in major immigration countries, the so-called migration-security nexus. To explore this argument, the analysis deals with three propositions. First, the end of the Cold War has opened political space for focusing on diffuse and hard-to-grasp security threats that do not emanate from sovereign states but from non-state actors, involving issues such as crime, drugs, migration. International migration has served as a convenient reference point for unspecific fears. Second, securitizing policies such as stepped-up border controls and stricter internal surveillance of immigrants produces unintended effects. Securitizing policy issues creates higher expectations among voters that governments are actually able to effectively control transnational movements. Third, 9/11 entails ambiguous consequences for immigrant integration. Clearly, the levels of harassment against immigrants from the Middle East increased considerably, at least on the short term. Yet the crisis situation may even lead to an increased immersion into the politics of the respective national immigration states. General attitudes and policies towards cultural pluralism will probably not be significantly affected by 9/11. Overall, the exploration of the migration-security nexus is part of broader studies into the virtuous and vicious cycles of transnationalization, the growing importance of non-state actors in world and national politics.

This e-book is comprised of selected papers from the 14th International Congress of Cybernetics and Systems of the World Organisation of Systems and Cybernetics (WOSC) held in Wroclaw, Poland in September 2008. The conference was hosted by the Institute of Information Science and Engineering at Wroclaw University of Technology and provided an open forum in which researchers coming from different scientific disciplines and research areas could discuss and share their experience regarding methodological approaches and application areas of cybernetics and systems. The topics covered in this e-boo

This essay discusses some current proposals for improving global environmental governance and suggests that the debate be shifted to the emerging paradigm of how to organize to achieve a green economy