'Our University Is Growing Together with the April Conference'

April 19^th marks the official start of the XVII April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development. Below, HSE Academic Supervisor Evgeny Yasin, who is also the Chairman of the Conference’s Programme Committee, discusses what participants can expect from this year’s conference. 

In a certain sense, the April Conference is a type of business card for the Higher School of Economics. Most of the conferences that international universities hold typically focus on either classical or applied science, but such conferences have practically no agenda for large-scale reforms. This is what makes the HSE’s April Conference unique; it plays an active role in the transformations that are taking place in our country. Our university has grown together with the April Conference – starting with the fairly narrow spectrum of problems that had to be overcome throughout the process of reform and ending with the point at which we could consider ourselves to be equal participants in the global academic process as concerns economics and its related disciplines.

Our conference, like our university, is a living organism in that we’re constantly growing and changing. This year, the conference’s plenary sessions, of which there are many, will take place in a new format. It truly is a great thing to see HSE alumni participate in the academic discussions, and there are more and more of them every year. Some key alumni taking part in this year’s plenary session on macroeconomics are Maxim Oreshkin, Russian Deputy Finance Minister, and Konstantin Noskov, the Head of the Analytical Centre for the Government of Russia.

This year we’ve decided to take an important step in the evolution of the Conference

Lev Jakobson
HSE First Vice Rector

This session will open the conference and be of particular interest not only because of its participants, who include the Deputy Chairman and Chief Economist of Vnesheconombank, Andrei Klepach, but also because of the papers being presented. Key presenters include Evsei Gurvich, who is the Head of the Economic Expert Group, and First Deputy Governor of the Russian Central Bank, Ksenia Yudaeva.

Overall, all of the plenary sessions feature intriguing papers that, I hope, inspire substantive discussions. The conference will include papers by researchers from outside the Higher School of Economics as well. I am personally looking forward to the paper Lev Gudkov*, Director of the Levada Center*, is presenting at the session on Wealth and the Dynamics of Social Structure. And, of course, we can all look forward to the paper Victor Polterovich, Mathematical Economics Laboratory Chief at the RAS Central Economics and Mathematics Institute (CEMI), is planning to present at the session on Values, Institutions, and Trust. This session will also feature talks by the Dean of Moscow State University’s Economics Faculty, Alexander Auzan; HSE Professor Alexander Arkhangelsky*; and, we are hoping, Alexei Kudrin, who is the Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences at St. Petersburg State University.

In addition, I would like to propose a topic for discussion: how institutional reform programmes should depend on civil culture

Victor Polterovich
Mathematical Economics Laboratory Chief at CEMI

And of course, I’d also like to invite everyone to attend the session featuring the paper, “The Russian Economy: Problems, Solutions, Consequences,” authored by Natalia Akindinova, Yaroslav Kuzminov, and myself. In this paper, we have come up with four possible trajectories for our economy, and we discuss the likelihood of these scenarios based on a survey of various experts.

I also consider Lilia Ovcharova’s paper on investing in human capital to be very important. She’ll present the paper at the plenary session on social policy.

All political parties can consider this paper to be our view on entering a growth trajectory

Lilia Ovcharova
HSE Director for Social Studies

This year’s sessions cover practically all economic disciplines studied at HSE: economics, macroeconomics, microeconomics, industrial markets, etc. New sessions are arising as well, and we are not just pulling them out of thin air. The April Conference’s programme is developed in two stages. In the first stage, we collect all of the proposals that researchers send us, and we group them into blocks. In the second stage, with the opinions of our researchers in mind, we identify the most important topics and reach out to the experts we’d like to see at the conference. Such a combinatory approach yields the most interesting results.

* Решением Минюста РФ Левада-Центр включён в реестр некоммерческих организаций, выполняющих функции иностранного агента.
* A. Arkhangelsky (Александр Архангельский) и Lev Gudkov (Лев Гудков) включены Минюстом в Реестр иностранных агентов.