The paper deals with the problems of measuring uneven wealth distribution in the bitcoin ecosystem. All existing bitcoin distribution models depend on the analysis of bitcoin wallets and bitcoin addresses. They are based on the Bitcoin Rich List. This approach is insufficient due to the inscrutable relationships between people owning bitcoin, bitcoin wallets, and bitcoin addresses. In this paper, we used the methods of comparative analysis resulted in graphics as represented by Lorentz and Lamé curves and distribution of the Gini coefficients and the Kolkata index. We identified empirical cumulative functions of wealth distribution and the number of addresses with positive balance during the bubble and after its explosion. Approximations of the distribution of ‘poor’ and ‘rich’ addresses have been obtained and compared with the other results from the cited literature. The general public views the equality of network members as synonymous with the equal distribution of wealth among them. Emerging financial bubbles, especially in the US financial markets, lead to an increase in income inequality. However, after a bubble explodes, the inequality falls to the initial level.

The study is aimed at determining the factors influencing the trade credits dynamics for twenty three firms registered on the Macedonian Stock Exchange, as well as at checking for crisis effects from 2011 to 2015. The study includes a review of the literature on commercial credit factors; elaborately analyzed descriptive statistics of the collected data and dependent variable variance; tests for unobservable effects and their functional form; evaluation of panel regression and interpretation of the results. The authors have proved that net trade credits for these firms depends mainly on the growth potential of lagging firms and their vulnerability, and the crisis effects are significant only for the latter factor. Moreover, the overall efficiency of firms’ assets and their ability to convert income into cash does not have a significant impact in the crisis and post-crisis periods. The growth opportunities and profitability demonstrate a negative impact, meaning that growing and more profitable firms on average tend to expand and receive more trade credits than counterparties. Profitability has a significant impact on trade credit and the effect is seen during the first year after the crisis. Thus, the dynamics of trade credits of registered Macedonian firms is largely determined by the internal factors of a firm, and not by the external macroeconomic situation. Therefore, better financial management is suggested to improve the trade credit policy. One of the directions for further research is the evaluation of the autoregressive component of the trade credit dynamics, as well as including spatial effects in the regression equation.

The article describes one of the main tools of green financing — the green loan. This is a loan designed for environmental projects related to agriculture, renewable energy sources, environmentally friendly industry, etc. The tasks are to analyze the current research on this topic, to study the regulatory aspects of green lending, its main types, impact on the bank economic indicators, advantages and disadvantages. The analysis of the current research has shown insufficient development of the idea of the green loan. It is only the theoretical aspect of its influence on the bank activities that has been defined, not its practical effect. The authors studied the green loan impact on the results of the bank activities on the example of overdue loans. For the analysis, they used the panel data of 10 out of 24 largest banks in China in 2012–2017. The evaluation is based on a random effects model. The calculations have been done by means of the generalized least-squares method in MSEXCEL. It has been revealed that green loans in the loan portfolio of the bank contribute to the overdue loans decrease. It has been determined that the main factors influencing the decision making by the borrower and the lender are reputation, public, equity and regulatory pressure, alternative capital pools, credit profiles, availability, capital requirements. However, there is no standard credit documentation for the green loan today. To make this financial tool efficient and sound, it is necessary to further develop regulations, to change approaches to disclosing information on sustainability issues in the non-financial part of annual reporting. The authors have made a conclusion about the rapid development and expansion of the green loan due to the flexible conditions for its provision and availability.

Based on the analysis of macroeconomic statistics, the article reveals the significance of programmatic approaches in budgeting concerning Russia’s state reflation. The purpose of the article is to identify problems impeding results-based budgeting in Russia and to find the ways to solve them. The methods of dynamic, system and factor analysis have been used. Foreign experience and best practices of program approaches in budgeting have been analyzed. It has been concluded that the following problems impede the effectiveness of introducing program approaches into Russia’s budgeting process: insufficient methodological elaboration of state programs; underdevelopment of planning institutions; low efficiency level of investment projects; poorly developed corporate sector of the economy. The authors have developed recommendations on increasing the effectiveness of the program approaches in Russia’s budgeting process: to create a specialized body responsible for developing the methodological support for results-based budgeting; to process current methodological support and to develop recommendations on improving the quality of economic planning; to introduce holding competitions for investment projects to get the right to implement them at the expense of the state budget. Further development of the results-based budgeting in Russia depends on the quality of the developed state programs and the effectiveness of individual investment projects. This requires improving the quality of planning and analytical calculations at the planning stage. The state should raise its attention to the quality of state programs as well as to the methodological support for planning investment projects implemented within the framework of the program approach.

The purpose of the article is to study the issues of development and rational use of local budgets of agro-industrial territories. The authors have analyzed specific indicators of the local budget typical for the Ryazan region for 2014– 2016 — the Kaninsky rural settlement of the Sapozhkovsky District. Due to the economic-statistical and SWOT-analysis, some problem aspects have been revealed. In particular, local authorities do not have an opportunity to independently draw up their own full budgets. As a rule, they are pumped up at the expense of financial sources not controlled by the rural administrations. This has a number of negative consequences: it does not contribute to revitalizing and rationalizing actions of the local authorities to replenish the tax potential of the territory; it reduces the administration’s responsibility for the budget execution and meeting commitments to the public; it causes dependency of local rural administrations while developing the revenue part of the budget; it does not contribute to the development of economic initiatives. The authors conclude that to improve the development and rational use of local budgets of rural settlements, it makes sense: to consolidate the results-oriented principles of medium-term planning and budgeting; to accept the requirement for further decentralization of the budget system and to provide real budget independence; to provide effective control over budgets of all levels and their real transparency.

The corporate bond market development is integral to increase the resilience of the Russian economy to external shocks and to build a new growth model in terms of sanctions. The purpose of the article is to analyze the current state of the Russian corporate bond market and to develop proposals for accelerating its further development considering the international experience. The proposals are based on a study of the legal base for the functioning of the international bond market, as well as modern technologies and tools that have proven to be effective in practice. As part of a comparative analysis, a hypothetical-deductive research method has been used. The author has proposed: to develop and adopt independent federal law “On Corporate Bonds”; to amend and supplement the Russian legislation on the protection of the rights of investors who purchase corporate bonds; to make trial (debut) issues in the Russian stock market for bonds denominated in foreign currencies (for example, in RMB); to expand the line of bond types, etc. It has been concluded that, despite the unfavorable external and internal conditions, there is a steady increase in the number of issuers and corporate bonds in circulation in Russia. Active bond issue in the Russian financial market in the near future will happen not only in the corporate, but also in the public segment. It will require more active involvement of individuals in purchasing government and corporate bonds as investors. Various types of institutional investors competing with banks will also be attracted. Corporate bond issue can ease the financial burden of banks and companies that have problems with refinancing their external debts. It can also help to solve the problem of financing of the Russian companies that have focused on obtaining various bank loans in order to implement their business plans. This will help to increase the supply of temporarily free monetary resources, to reduce their cost and more efficiently transform savings into investments.

The article examines structural policy as a tool for developing a new economic growth model in Russia. The author
considers the conditions of economic growth based on increased investment. The purpose of the article is to determine
the current characteristics of the Russian economy structural dynamics by the components of GDP and basic sectors.
The basic sectors of the current investment structure have been assessed — processing sector and transactional and raw materials sector — and the directions for further development have been specified. The research methodology
consists of: structural analysis of GDP and sectoral dynamics; the received and applied “structural formula” of assessing the contribution of the system elements to economic growth; formulated simple optimization models and a numerical optimization method (gradient projection method). The method of empirical and statistical estimates has also been used. Optimization models have made it possible to demonstrate the solution to the problem of distributing investments between the sectors with a target function for maximum profit and minimum risk. The analysis of growth and the conditions for economic growth obtained by the model-analytical method — in terms of the rate of change in oil prices and the exchange rate — allowed us to empirically show periods of growth and recession in the economy. They depend on the growth rate of oil prices and the devaluation of the rouble. This approach, with further use of econometric models linking macroparameters, will make it possible to evaluate the effect of changes in structural parameters on economic growth. The overall result of the study is as follows: the intensification of investments is insufficient to organize the investment model of economic growth in Russia. The stimulation of gross consumption and a change in the structure of investments are required. It is necessary to reduce the gap between the sectors by risk mitigation. External factors affecting the economic growth in Russia (oil prices, currency inflows) must be eliminated by changing the structure, including the sensitivity increase of its elements to macroeconomic policy instruments, and differentiating sectoral policy measures considering the positive impact on the contribution of GDP components and sectors of money growth and inflation.

One of the most important external factors affecting the exchange rate of the US dollar to the Russian rouble has been the global oil price. Russia, whose economy is mainly associated with oil production, is one of the world’s largest oil suppliers. Therefore, the slightest fluctuations in oil prices can have a significant effect on its economy. The aim of the article is to study the relationship between macroeconomic parameters and oil prices. The objectives of the study are to identify factors having a long-term positive relationship with oil prices based on a mathematical approach, as well as to propose improvements for Russian macroeconomic indicators. The authors use modern mathematical methods of vector autoregression (VAR-model), the Granger method and the Dickey-Fuller test to study the long-term and shortterm relationships between the relevant time series for the period from 2014 to 2016. On this basis, it was calculated that a 1% increase in GDP leads to a strengthening of the national currency by 1.47%. This fact can be explained by the overall growth of the national economy. The Granger test results for the model show that global oil price (and Russian GDP) has the greatest impact on the exchange rate in the short term. The following actions are proposed for improving macroeconomic indicators: stabilisation of foreign economic policy; diversification of exports (although oil revenues can serve as a tool for improving the quality of Russian economic development and public life in general); development of the Russian ‘Urals’ benchmark and increasing its trading volumes on the world market; transition to rubles for settlements of Russian oil and gas; use of a ruble indicator (ruble barrel) of the ‘Urals’ oil price to support the development of Russia’s financial and economic policy.

The article is devoted to the impact assessment of the real sector and other factors of economic growth (characteristics of the financial sector, paid services and household incomes) on the dynamics of the business activity index, an integral indicator characterizing the state and trends of the country’s macroeconomic development. The purpose of the article is to justify the need and highlight the feasibility for developing new aggregated business activity indexes that include a wider range of the national economy areas than the output index of goods and services for the Rosstat basic business lines. The authors have used the design method for integral estimates of macroeconomic dynamics, regression analysis, and a probabilistic approach (the method of pairwise preferences) to determine the weighing coefficients of the basic indicators. The work has resulted in time series of business activity indices (in tables and graphs), based on the method proposed by the authors. The new index of business activity suggests a more objective assessment of the state and trends of socio-economic development compared to the same Rosstat index. This index can help to improve the macroeconomic forecasting efficiency and lay the groundwork for more grounded management decisions.

The research is based on the materials of the largest oil and gas companies in Russia and China, whose total production in each country exceeds 86%. The authors used indicators that are available to the world statistics and relate to the system of sustainable financial growth in Russia and China from 1996 to 2016. The aim of the article is to study the impact of investments in personnel social welfare, energy efficiency and environmental protection on sustainable financial growth of the oil and gas industry. The research objectives are to develop a theory of sustainable financial growth in the oil and gas industry, as well as its assessment and forecasting tools. The authors use the methods of statistical analysis of financial, social, energy and environmental coefficients, and mathematical modeling. They propose a new methodology for calculating the index of the financial sustainable growth system. The authors substantiate the composition and the structure of the sustainable financial growth system of oil and gas companies in Russia and China, as well as the composition of the economic processes that influence or predetermine this growth. The relationship between the subsystem indicators were analyzed in the article. The article substantiates the index of the sustainable financial growth system of oil and gas companies in Russia and China. The authors developed a model for calculating the index of the sustainable financial growth system in the AnyLogic program. The results of the study showed that the factors of the “energy efficiency” and “social subsystem” subsystems affect financial sustainable growth in Russian oil and gas companies, but the financial subsystem is least dependent on the “environment” subsystem. The situation in Chinese oil and gas companies is the opposite: the financial sustainable growth is mostly affected by the factors of the “environment” and “energy efficiency” subsystems. The financial subsystem is least connected with the subsystem of personnel social welfare. Nevertheless, the study proves that in the oil and gas companies in both countries, nonfinancial indicators (each country has its own block) have a positive effect on the financial sustainable growth. According to the authors, the main conclusion is to consider social, energy and environmental indicators that have the strongest influence on the financial sustainable growth in the company’s financial statements. The developed AnyLogic model can be used to predict the index of the sustainable growth system and its management. The results of the study are recommended for the oil and gas corporations of China.