Issue 2015 no1 contents:

The article is devoted to a critically important, in the author’s opinion, issue of the ethical regulation of public servants’ official behavior. He considers the complex of ethical-legal mechanisms as one of the most effective ways in order to correct the obviously unsatisfactory current situation of public life in this field. As long as it is not only Russia’s trouble and many other countries pay considerable attention to ethical aspects, the author reflects the situation in the frames of a broader theoretical position and also addresses the international experience. In particular, he gives much attention to Canada, where the ethical regulation of public service is developed sufficiently well and the country has achieved serious success in this respect. Ethical codes are considered as "moral navigators" in the contemporary complicated world, because vitality and legitimity of a political system much depends on whether political institutions and behavior of high rank public officials correspond to the prevailed public values and ideals, accord with the norms and standards of public morality, or they do not. A degree of public trust to holders of public posts depends critically on it. The administrative ethical codes of different levels and the "ethical infrastructure" that provide their fulfillment have been thoroughly analyzed. Special attention is paid to the role of the leader, to moral self-restrictions of public servants and to exercising control over them. The balance between moral and legal norms has been considered in details, as well as the modern situation of Russia in this field.

The article aims at analyzing international legislation approaches to defining the public benefit status which entitles nongovernmental noncommercial organizations to government support. International definitions of public benefit status are examined in comparison with major provisions of the Russian law on socially oriented NGOs. The analysis focused on the following key components of the public benefit status: the concept and goals of public benefi t activity, legislative and statutory approaches to the status of public benefit organizations, regulation of public benefit organizations activity, benefits and responsibilities of public benefit organizations.

The analysis has identified essential lacunas in Russian legislation which are mostly associated with the conditions of regulating activities of socially oriented NGOs receiving government support.

The article makes a conclusion that a holistic, systemic approach to the legal definition of the status of socially oriented NGOs in the Russian law, primarily addressing the identified lacunas, is an essential condition of improving the effectiveness of government support for socially oriented organizations in Russia.

Suggested recommendations on improving the legal definition of the status of socially oriented organizations include: a more specified description of types of public benefit activity; the establishment of a government body charged with awarding and withdrawing the status of socially oriented organizations and monitоring their activities; a specific list of criteria for an organization to receive the status of socially oriented and the term during which this status is valid; the responsibility for socially oriented organizations to make their reporting open to public access.

The annex contains the typology of public benefit activities and regulating bodies in European countries.

Performance management of the local governance in Russia becomes nowadays very important. It happens due to the fact that the quality of public and local services to a large extent determines the quality of the citizens’ day-to-day life. Nevertheless, the methods of performance management for the local authorities cannot be "directed from the ones above".. These methods must be concerned primarily about satisfying citizens’ requirements for the urban environment quality. Thus, composite methods for performance management of the local authorities should be developed. They must combine the statistics and citizens’ surveys results.

This article presents an analysis of Russian legislation and the regional practice of the local authorities’ performance management; a scheme of the performance analysis of different departments of the city administrations to develop some elements for evaluating and monitoring local authorities activities, and for enhancing citizens’ satisfaction with the quality of the environment. In addition, it e discusses some points of the statistics and surveys results correlation and possible errors of the evaluation..

In 2004–2005 the Russian government started to implement the reform of public procurement. In order to decrease incentives to corruption and encourage competition, they established new procurement procedures. Meanwhile, according to the anecdotal evidence, since the decade of the reform, different types of rent-seeking behavior have been still widespread in Russian procurement. In this article we conduct a comparative analysis of the procurement procedures in Federal Law 44 depending on the risks of rent-seeking behavior of public procurers and suppliers. We consider restrictions of competition to be indicators of corruption risks, i.e. the procurer’s rent-seeking behavior, and collusive practices (including imitation of collusion) and adverse selection to be indicators of the bidder’s rent-seeking behavior. At first we describe Russian procurement procedures and then we employ the case-study in order to analyze in-depth risks of various forms of rent-seeking behavior. We find that the risks of procurers’ rent-seeking behavior are negatively connected to the risks of suppliers’ rent-seeking. Some procurement procedures have more corruption risks, while others provide ample opportunities for collusion practices or an adverse selection. Basing on these results, we make recommendations to the regulator and to the government. First, the stimulating effect of monitoring will be higher under fixed monitoring costs, if the regulator monitors more probable forms of rentseeking in each procurement procedure. Second, the social welfare will be highest, if the choice of procurement procedure is based not only on the product’s characteristics, but also on the market structure, including the risks of horizontal collusion.

The article presents main results of the development and approbation of the technology (methods) to monitor the incorporation of the anticorruption expertise of the normative legal acts and projects (AE NLAP) in the lawmaking activity of public authorities and local government in the Russian Federation. The expertise was carried out within the scientific research work of the same name by researchers in the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.

According to the authors of the article, the Composite Technique (Methods) to carry out monitoring of the implementation of the AE NLAP in the practice of lawmaking activity and the productivity of anticorruption expertise must: include the study of the indicators of the execution of all instructions of the adopted normative legal acts concerning the anticorruption examination (on decision-making, performing actions, observing the requirements, bans and restrictions) on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the productivity of anticorruption expertise, including the solution of problems that have caused the necessity of anticorruption expertise, achievement of the set objectives; orientate the anticorruption expertise productivity indicators system towards assessing the extent of influence of the AE NLAP on corruption risks of the legal regulations, on corruption practices and markets; provide the possibility to assess the extent of realization of the anticorruption expertise by using these indicators, to do the correlating with them about the bodies and organizations responsible for carrying out anticorruption expertise, with the years of research being taken into consideration. 

The authors carried out approbation of this technology in relation to: the Council of the Federation of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation; Prosecutor General’s Office of the Russian Federation; Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation; Public Administration of Murmansk region.

The carried-out approbation showed the possibility of practical use of the developed Technique, including tools, and also its introduction in the public administration of counteracting corruption in public authorities and local government.

The article examines "regulatory requirements" as a subject of state control over business in Russia. The author deliberately does not use the term "the rule of law". The article states that a set of requirements for business is wider than the legislative regulation.

First, the article analyzes the regulatory nature of the requirements, especially in the technical field. The requirements are considered in relation to the rule of law. The article explores approaches to the definition of regulatory requirements in Russian legal science. The author analyzes legislation definitions for a set of requirements for business.

The author concludes that regulatory requirements are not always identical to the rule of law. Regulatory requirements are a set of obligatory requirements for entrepreneurs’ economic activity. Validation failure leads to negative consequences.

Second, the article analyzes the problems of the regulatory requirements in practice. Lack of information about the requirements, their irrelevance and inconsistency are problems of the regulatory requirements in Russia.

Many requirements regulating economic activity are not compatible with the current development level of science and technology. The problems are analyzed on the basis of the Russian judicial practice and annual monitoring reports by Higher School of Economics.

Finally, the author provides an approach to the possible solution of the regulatory requirements’ problem. The author proposes to create a nationwide Internet portal about regulatory requirements. The portal should contain full information about all regulatory requirements. The author recommends extending moratorium on the use of the requirements adopted by the bodies and organizations of the former USSR government.

The objective to improve the effectiveness of public administration and governance in the context of cuts in public resources available for supporting public authorities is especially urgent at the time of economic crisis. Cutting payroll for federal executive bodies by 10 per cent is one of the initiatives which are being reviewed as part of the efforts to amend the federal budget for 2015. In some cases, such reduction would inflict actual job cuts while the total volume of public administration functions should be maintained if not raised.

Sustaining the current level of government effectiveness in the current context requires a critical review of the existing allocation of human resources with respect to objectives and targets of federal executive authorities and public policies as a whole. The review of staff allocations by functional groups presented in this article demonstrates that the existing use of human resources by federal executive bodies is suboptimal. To reduce the total staffi ng level and to allocate the resources rationally in accordance with the priorities (the latter being more important than the former), it is necessary to implement strategic HR management practices synchronized with the systems of strategic and budget planning.

This article is based on the research on Improving Effectiveness of Public Administration and Optimization of Staff Level conducted as a part of public assignment for RANEPA in 2014.

The Russian health sector has accumulated a lot of serious labor problems, the most important of which are: a low level of labor planning, the shortage of physicians and other medical workers, substantial disproportions in their structure. The objective of this paper is to compare some aspects of health labor policy in Russia and Western countries. Three major developments are addressed: 1) the ways to enhance physicians’ efficiency, 2) the search for the optimum level of physicians’ specialization, 3) the changes in division of labor between various professional groups of medical workforce. The comparison of these developments allowed to determine substantially different types of health labor strategies in Russia and Western countries and to look more critically at the major strategic and regulatory documents in the Russian health sector. First, Russia differs much in terms of the size of physicians’ remuneration, its structure (the share of basic part is lower), as well as in the legal status of outpatient doctors. Second, contrary to Western countries where some efforts are made to overcome the excessive specialization of physicians, in Russia this process is escalating, particularly in primary health care. The overspecialization of PHC contributes much to its understaffing, low quality and dissatisfaction of patients. Third, the process of division of labor between physicians, medical nurses and allied health workers is intensively developing in Western countries, while in Russia this process is very slow. Some new categories of medical workers that support physicians are not known in Russia. Therefore the need for physicians is very high. Practical recommendations for health labor policy are made regarding each of the above developments.