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The US and the EU are negotiating a comprehensive Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The main purposes of the agreement are to stimulate economic growth and employment, to facilitate trade and investment and raise competitiveness on both sides of the Atlantic. The US and EU are the biggest trade and investment partners for each other, as well as most important partners for a number of other countries. The Trans-Atlantic free trade agreement would not only facilitate bilateral cooperation, but has a potential to set up new, more advanced international trade and investment rules and practices. The agreement is aimed, among other point, at resolving some of the existing problems in bilateral relations, such as differences in regulatory practices, market access conditions, government procurement, intellectual property rights (IPR) and investor protection. However, some of these differences are deeply inherent in the regulatory systems and have become the reasons for numerous disputes. Despite the fact that the negotiations on TTIP are still in progress, it is already possible to identify and assess the underlying differences that would potentially hamper the creation of deep provisions in the future agreement. The paper aims at analyzing the most difficult areas of negotiations and giving predictions for the future provisions. Firstly, the paper gives an overview of the scope and structure of bilateral relations between the US and EU. Secondly, the authors give detailed analysis of the most important points of the negotiation's agenda, making stress on the underlying differences in domestic regulation and assessing the depth of those differences. The conclusions are as follows. While some of the areas, such as tariffs, labor and environment, SMEs, state enterprises and others, are relatively easy to agree upon, as both economies are striving to achieve high standards, negotiations on other issues, such as government procurement, NTM regulation and IPR are less likely to achieve high standards.

The paper considers measures on Russia's integration into the global economy, aimed at the economic growth resumption. It analyzes conditions and mechanisms due to which the expanding trade and mutual investment with other countries contribute to economic growth in Russia. The paper provides policy recommendations for export support, regional economic integration agenda and the institutions reform.

The paper analyzes the problems of macroeconomic policy in Russia in 2000-2006. The authors estimate the trends of realization of monetary, credit, currency and budgetary policy under favorable and unfavorable external economic conditions. Different variants of government and central bank reaction to the oil prices conservation or decline are considered. Different scenarios of macroeconomic policy realization in 2007-2011 are modeled. The results of the computation are presented.

The authors analyze the equalization properties of the present system of resource allocation among budgets of different levels in Russia (allocation of tax revenue and intergovernmental transfers). They consider the actual impact of the following federal fiscal instruments on the regional income distribution: the system of intergovernmental transfers, the system of federal tax revenue sharing between federal and regional budgets and the federal net tax on the region.

The paper contains results of the analysis of personal income tax reform in Russia in 2000, including the influence of the reform on tax base, tax revenues and progressivity of income taxation. On the basis of the theoretical model the authors formulate two main hypotheses, concerning the influence of major factors on personal income tax revenues and tax base. The first hypothesis implies that the decrease in marginal income tax rate caused the decrease in personal income tax evasion, increase in tax revenues and tax base. The second hypothesis is that the decrease in tax evasion, especially among taxpayers with high incomes, increased their tax burden and, as a result, the level of vertical equity. The paper also includes the results of empirical tests of the above hypotheses about the change in tax evasion and progressivity using the regional data in 2000 and 2001; a number of measurers in the sphere of economic policy is put forward.