STEPAN ZEMTSOV AND PAVEL KOVAL SPOKE AT THE ST. PETERSBURG INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INEQUALITY AND DIVERSITY

Stepan Zemtsov delivered a presentation on “Economic crisis, institutions and small business in Russia” highlighting SME as a significant economy sector, potential source of employment, diversification and growth.

In the course of the presentation, the speaker identified factors of SME development in pre-crisis period and assessed the scale of the SME sector decline in the context of the pandemic and provided support measures based on the forecast of bench mark changes. He noted that digitalization and knowledge-intensive sectors contribute to the potential development of SME capacity: delivery, online services, Internet banking, etc.

In his presentation, the researcher focused on short and long-term measures of support required by the small and medium-sized business sector: subsidies, soft loans to the affected, tax incentives. As long-term measures, the expert recommends reducing the digital divide, introducing an ecosystem approach into business policy and retraining the unemployed.

Presentation.

Pavel Koval delivered a presentation: "Assessment of the household consumption in Russia based on RLMS microdata". The presentation focused on assessment of the marginal propensity to consume for various social groups of households in Russia.

A function of permanent income with a propensity to consume depending on the social characteristics of the household describes the level of consumption. The process of adaptive expectations describes changes in permanent income. The Koyck transformation was applied to obtain the dependence of consumption on the current observed income.

Based on this model, levels of the households’ marginal propensity to consume have been estimated. The analysis showed that on average wealthy households spend less of their permanent income on current consumption goods compared to poor households. An increase in the size of a household results in the growth of its marginal propensity to consume, and over time, they begin to save a major share of their permanent income.

Presentation.