The government policy in the agrarian sector is aimed at the recovery of the Russian village from the crisis and its transition to a new quality level, which is one of the key strategic goals of the social and economic development of the country. The establishment of a competitive agrarian sector will contribute to solving the problem of the country’s food security and become an important factor of the sustainable development of rural areas. The paper analyzes the economic potential of the new form of rural settlements and its role in the sustainable territorial development taking into account accumulated resources. The significance of the economic potential of eco-villages is determined by their ability to produce ecologically pure (organic) food products and by establishment of environmentally-friendly small-scale enterprises, agricultural diversification and development of alternative non-agrarian businesses. The formation of ecological villages is based on ecological rehabilitation of rural areas and ecologization of principal agricultural sectors. The high environmental literacy and the social activity of citizens in addressing socially significant problems of rural settlements are important social factors in the successful integration of eco-villages as a subject of sustainable territorial development. The economic potential of eco-villages analyzed in the paper can be used by regional and municipal authorities in preparing programs of sustainable territorial development with the purpose of establishing an integrated management system.

The relevance of the article is determined by the critical situation in the population’s mortality rate and health standards as well as by the state of things in the birth rate, marriage and family sphere in the context of threats that the demographic processes instability can bring to the Russian economy as a whole. The article discusses approaches to the concept of «demographic security», analyzes crisis phenomena in the demographic and migration processes and in the human reproduction sphere that threaten the economic growth of Russian regions. The centerpiece of the article is devoted to problems of the contemporary Russia related to alcoholism, drug addiction and smoking. The authors focus on current issues of the family policy and preservation of the family institution in Russia highlighting the problems associated with the spread of informal marriage, the growing number of abandoned children and challenges of adoption and child custody. The authors investigated in detail the issues of the birth rate increase, particularly in the aftermath of the social stratification of Russian society, and pay special attention to the issues of the male working population health maintenance in modern Russia, as well as to gender disproportions in the demographic structure of the population and education. The measures of the demographic and family policy proposed in the article to remedy the situation established in modern Russia can be used by federal and regional government authorities.

The key problem of the sustainable development of the Russian pension system is important not only for the senior generations of the Russian citizens, but also for all segments of the country’s macroeconomy since the pension system within the market labor relations framework (unlike «the Soviet model») is a complex of financial interrelations between the employee and the employer with the direct participation of the state (represented by its financial and law enforcement authorities). The key indicator of the state pension system development level is the replacement rate. The article analyzes the results of the lost earnings replacement rate calculation with account for characteristics of insured persons and provides an analytical estimation of the conformity of the «Russian» replacement factor to the minimum international standards of social security.

The qualifications framework is an important element of the qualification certification system. It is a compromise between the labor market requirements for qualifications and the academic learning outputs in a specific professional line. The structure of the IT qualifications framework is based on the European framework approach to the skill levels division and the requirements of employers in the IT sector declared in professional standards of the Information and Computer Technologies Industry Association («APKIT» in Russian). The article proposes IT qualifications framework descriptors and describes selection criteria for qualification, knowledge, skill and competency levels. The consistency of job titles and learning outcomes is determined. The specific feature of the IT qualifications framework is that the levels established by it include not only the existing educational levels (bachelor, specialist, master, graduate and doctoral degrees - levels 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, but also additional skill levels reflecting professional experience and additional vocational education in the MBA and EMBA systems, certification centers, informal training - qualification levels 3,5,7 and 9. The research was carried out under the INARM (Informatics and Management: Bologna Style Qualifications Frameworks) project of the European Union TEMPUS program.

Currently in line with global trends, the development of globalization and growing competition between different territories of the Russian Federation, there is an urgent need to involve and use all sources and resources of the territories in the process of regional economic capacity building for providing a sustainable, balanced social and economic growth of regions. Activating and promotion of local features, resources, initiative and creativity can best be manifested at the regional level and this is especially important for Russia given limited possibilities of the centralized management. The management component of the economic potential is taking on special significance as it directly interacts with other components of the economic potential and ensures their effective use. Thus, the goal of the research is to examine theoretical and methodological approaches to the content and structure of the economic potential of a region, to identify the key components in its structure as well as to define the role and areas of interaction between the management component and other components of the economic potential. The workis based on the results of research conducted bythe author in 20122013 years and theoretical provisions in the field of regionalistics. It also uses recent works on the development of economic potential of a region. The work uses both general scientific methods and methodology and traditional research methods such as systemic approach, method of analysis and synthesis, structural and substantive analysis. The article discusses in detail and analyzes the content and structure of the economic potential of a region, identifies its main components and defines the role and areas of interaction between the management component and other components of the economic potential. Suggested areas of interaction between the management component and other components of the economic potential can be useful for local governments and concerned organizations in their activities aimed at modernization of regional structural policy and economic growth priorities.

The in-house control of the financial stability of companies in the volatile economic environment is an effective tool for making managerial decisions. The instability and turbulence of the environment make it impossible to use traditional theories for this purpose. To overcome this problem, the article presents the author’s method of an improved paradigm of the internal control over the financial stability of an enterprise under the conditions of economic instability. The proposed conceptual approach reflects the order and conditions of carrying out the internal control as well as the procedure for making managerial decisions based on its results. To formalize the control, a control system card is proposed as an administrative document of a production enterprise that contains the description of the main components of the enterprise activity control system and its individual subsystems.

Reduction of payment backlogs issuing from failure to pay or from too long maturity dates was assumed to be effected by some provisions of the Act on the reduction of some of the administrative burden in the economy, introducing, among other things, Art. 15b of the Corporate Income Tax Act in Poland. An aim of the considerations carried out in this article is to present the rules concerning adjustment of tax-deductible expenses and to exhibit that in the reality those regulations are a source of tax risk and cause aggravation of the financial situation of taxpayers (not only debtors). In effect, these regulations are a further instrument of the growth of budgetary revenues.

The article provides an overview of the evidence and argument on increasing the country’s competitiveness as well as the competitiveness of its sectoral markets and companies to fulfill the task set in the documents of the Government of the Russian Federation as one of national priorities. For many years the problem of increasing competitiveness remains an area of high interest for the scientific community, however despite the great deal of attention it is mainly studied by marketers. In Russian literature there are only a few publications devoted to the financial aspect of competitiveness factors and competitive advantages. Meanwhile, the financial tools allow to evaluate many sustainable competitive advantages associated with the business reputation, human capital, designs and developments, know-how, long-term relationships with customers. The article interprets competitiveness as a complex synthetic concept which involves not only multilevel research subjects, but also various research angles. The authors reviewed and systematized the available financial tools to enhance the competitiveness of the modern Russian business, verbally formulated its financial model and illustrated with empirical data its strengths and weaknesses. The conducted analysis allowed to identify significant financial determinants of competitiveness of Russian business and tools to enhance it at the micro level. This article was prepared as part of research conducted in the framework of the State task for the Financial University in 2014. Materials can be used by Russian state bodies to determine the directions for institutional development of the business environment as well as by large Russian businesses to improve their competitiveness on the national and global markets.

The banking system must be seen as a whole comprising different national banks and loan institutions which activities are governed by the monetary mechanism. The banking system includes the network of commercial banks as well as other credit and settlement centers. The central bank is responsible for the state emission and foreign exchange policy and constitutes the core of the reserve system. [1, p. 234]. Commercial banks carry out a wide range of functions: keeping of customer current accounts, crediting of individuals and legal entities, purchase and sale of government and corporate securities, and many others [2]. Today most European banks are highly developed banking institutions providing a broad range of banking services. Therefore, the analysis of the European banking sector is of particular interest to banking analysts.The article analyzes the structure of the European banking market,determines the level of market competition,and identifies the commercial bank which position on the analyzed market is close to monopolistic.

Targeted development of credit brokerage is an essential element of the government program concerning the Russian credit system and financial market development. It calls for immediate improvement of the legislation and the regulatory framework, introduction of new Basel-II and Basel-III standards, development and implementation of the methodology and mechanisms of credit institution regulation to ensure protection of rights of creditors and financial services consumers. The article presents a comparative analysis of the international experience and the Russian practice in the lending sphere and investigates the work of the credit brokerage institution in the framework of the current legislation and established business practices along with problems arising in professional activities carried out by a credit broker. The author explores the duties of credit brokers and classifies the latter according to their specialization in the credit services market. The author also identifies the basic stages and formulates the tendencies of the credit brokerage development abroad and in Russia paying special attention to the issues of self-regulation and activities of the National Association of Credit Brokers and Financial Consultants of Russia (ACBR). The article contains recommendations for legislative and executive authorities and gives a summary of the ACBR activities. The introduction of the proposed innovations will promote progressive development of the mechanism of state regulation in the credit brokerage field along with the credit brokerage transformation to an efficient mechanism in the credit market.

The internal rate of return (IRR) is among the most widely used characteristics of investment projects. In the deterministic case the IRR can be found as a solution to an algebraic equation. The existence and applicability of the IRR may be guaranteed by rather general conditions, e.g. those of Norstrom theorem. Under uncertainty, the IRR ceases to be uniquely determined even for typical projects (a project is typical if costs precede returns). Under uncertainty, the IRR can take values from a more or less large set of possible values. A key problem is to transform the information about initial parameters into a distribution of the IRR values. Probabilistic methods can be used if quite a number of stringent requirements are met. If an unusual or extraordinary project is considered the probabilistic approach is not sufficiently substantiated. In such cases possibilistic methods and fuzzy set theory seem to be more suitable. The present paper aims to provide a method for evaluating the IRR of investment projects with fuzzy cash flows using the possibility theory. Given a fuzzy cash flow, the IRR is presented as a fuzzy set and the membership function may be considered as a version of distribution. Under the standard addition of fuzzy numbers we give explicit formulas for the membership function of the IRR. If components of a fuzzy cash flow are correlated we use the addition of fuzzy numbers with respect to t-norms. Generally, a possibilistic evaluation of the IRR with respect to a non-standard t-norm is rather difficult and was not considered before. If the t-norm is generated by a convex additive generator we reduce the evaluation of the IRR to a common convex optimization problem. A numerical example is presented. We believe the proposed method can be applied to evaluating the efficiency of investment projects with fuzzy cash flows.

The relevance of the subject addressed is to a great extent due to the fact that the public-private partnership in the form of a concession creates a substantial added value in the country’s development. Concessions solve national-scale tasks by efforts of private capital. The efficiency of a concession in the solution of tasks set by the state depends on whether the business has long-term interests. The paper analyzes relevant statutory regulations governing the concession agreements, describes the current system of concession bidding in Kazakhstan and brings the domestic experience of concession project implementation to a system. Based on the revealed problem scope, the author proposes ways to enhance the efficiency of concession projects.

Starting from the contribution made by the Nobel laureates Merton Miller and Franco Modigliani, the issue of interdependences among the capital structure,the cost of capital and firm value and their implementation in the financial models for practical needs has been a topical field of scientific research. During decades, since the breakthrough paper the cost of capital, corporate finance and the theory of investment went to press in 1958, a wide spectrum of publications appeared in leading journals worldwide generalizing the basic model of Modigliani-Miller by relaxing restrictions in initial assumptions.The paper investigates the «The Brusov-Filatova-Orekhova theory» which completely disregards all the findings of previous research generallyrecognized byprofessionals in the field,and claims no less than to generalize the theory of Modigliani - Miller «in a case of companies with an arbitrary lifetime», and to be the first to find «the solution of the problem of weighted average cost of capital, WACC, for the finite valuation horizon». We show that the basic assumptions of «The Brusov-Filatova-Orekhova theory» are insolvent, the theory itself is erroneous and, therefore, all derived conclusions and generalizations are scientifically irrelevant and of no practical significance.

Leasing has proved itself as a powerful and effective area for the investment development of individual enterprises and industries. The competition in the market of lease services encourages leasing companies to expand the lease product range and seek alternative sources of financing lease transactions, of which securitization may become a promising tool. After the transition of the Russian banking system to international standards of capital calculation in the framework of Basel II and Basel III agreements, operations of lease assets securitization will have to meet the capital reservation requirements. Accordingly, the introduction of new standards makes it necessary to analyze their possible impact on the securitization attractiveness to the lessors. By an example of the default data of the securitized Volkswagen pool of operating lease assets the current research proves that the Basel committee’s methodology for the capital requirements definition is excessively conservative in respect of the residual value risk. Current foreign investigations into the subject also consistently express the viewpoint that the leasing industry is characterized by rather high recovery rates. This article proposes a new author’s approach to the residual value risk evaluation modifying the Basel methodology in respect of forming capital requirements upon lease assets securitization. The author’s model has been tested on a Volkswagen securitization transaction. The considered approach is based on the Gumbel copula model.

The eco-tourism development in the Altai Republic is an up-to-date task since the formation of the tourist sector will boost the whole regional economy of the Altai Republic, provide significant social and economic benefits not only at the regional but also at the nation-wide level, allow partial solution of the problem of uneven distribution of economic resources and the manpower in Russia without upsetting the balance between the environment and the economic reproduction. This research work includes methods of qualitative modeling as well as elements of the graph theory and the cluster analysis. All analytical methods were realized by using the R programming language. In this research the basic principles of the qualitative modeling that allows taking into account qualitative factors influencing the tourist industry are analyzed, a qualitative model of the ecological tourism development is developed, the optimum directions of investments in the tourist industry of the Altai Republic are defined. The basic provisions of the article and the research findings can be used for creation of an effective tourism management system both at the level of regional authorities and the level of tourist industry subjects. The qualitative modeling algorithm has an independent scientific and practical value and can be used for high-quality modeling of various systems of regional economy, including modeling of the tourist sector.