Issue 2018 no5 contents:

China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), officially unveiled in 2013, has been promptly placed among the top priorities of China’s foreign policy. One of the BRI’s cooperation priorities is unimpeded trade, which implies the improvement of the investment and trade facilitation and removal of the recurrent investment and trade barriers. Despite its apparent flexibility and openness to embracing existing regional and multilateral platforms, there has been little debate on the compatibility of the BRI objectives with the existing economic integration projects. The paper is aimed at enriching this debate by addressing the relationship of the BRI with the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), a regional economic grouping bringing together several of China’s important BRI partners including Russia and Central Asian countries. The paper addresses the current progress in bridging the two grand economic projects and outlines the priority directions for further coordination between them.

Over the past few decades there has been a significant change in the way we view the development processes of energy services governance in the European Union (EU) and on a national level. The latest analysis has shown that, after the processes of liberalization and deregulation, the former exceptions to the rules of competition in Europe begin to assume different corporate forms, instead of the purely public enterprise, making a shift in the direction of the regulated mixed-economy. From this point of view, the aim of the article is to present an overview of the new public governance approach to delivering electricity services in the EU (the regulatory state) and the effect of it, particularly in the Bulgarian energy sector – the electricity market. The European regulatory model of energy services is a relatively new approach which appeared in the last two decades of the 20th century and it is part of the wider debate about the liberalization of electricity services in the EU. It is going to be used alongside a combination of approaches including institutional, normative and expert analysis in order to better understand the model of regulations in the EU. The results of the paper could help both theoreticians and practitioners to note the fact that the paradigm of supplying energy services nowadays has changed. This leads to different challenges in contemporary public governance as well as on a national level, in which the main goals are to protect the public interest on the one hand, and to facilitate competition on the other.

The article reveals the role of the subjective factor in decision-making in the international sphere, based on analysis of the results of surveys the opinions of experts and decision makers from 16 countries of the Asia-Pacific region. The main objective of the study was to identify the views of the experts on the characteristics of the situation in the Asia Pacific region: economy, security, risks and threats and ways to overcome them, and most importantly – the main directions of the cooperation of the Asia-Pacific countries with Russia and methods of their implementation.
The results of international surveys formed the empirical dataset for determining the main objectives of the administrative decision-making process aimed at the development of partnership relations between Russia and APR countries and their implementation. The decision makers were provided with information about how our country and its actions are seen by our Eastern partners, what is approved of and what is apprehended. The Information can be used for building and adjusting the image of Russia abroad for promoting the effective cooperation and coordination of the interests of the countries in the region.

This article discusses the basics of the integration of Eurasia’s agricultural sector, based on the integration process between the European Union (EU) and Asian countries. The EU’s agricultural integration has to be regarded as an innovative, large-scale project. The transformation of the EU’s agricultural market has proven to be a complex agricultural integration that combines multiple ideological, financial, and political interests.
Throughout the period of the EU’s agricultural integration, its financial instruments and structured management were stable and, consequently, the integration was effective. However, the development stages of the ecological agriculture projects (EAP) study showed that the formation of a competitive EU agricultural market had some disadvantages. The complexity of the development of the agricultural market in Asian countries, including Kazakhstan and China, results from the fact that, unlike Europe, the Asian countries are at significantly different levels of development with respect to their economic, cultural, and political systems.

The Free Trade Agreement between the Eurasian Economic Union and Vietnam, signed in May 2015, has special political significance for both Eurasian integration and Russian-Vietnamese relations. However, an important issue is the problem of the efficiency of this agreement for the Russian economy. Despite the high level of political contact between Russia and Vietnam, their economic interaction is still at a relatively low level. But at the same time, the FTA is often considered to be a factor that can impact positive influence on economic cooperation between Russia and Vietnam. Focusing on the political meaning of the EAEU-Vietnam FTA, the aim of the article is to research the role of Russian state administration in the development of the free trade zone.
The author analyzes the activity of Russian state structures (the Ministry of Economic Development, the Russian Export Center, the Trade Mission in Vietnam etc.) in terms of their assistance in the realization of the FTA, considers the results of their work and makes conclusions on the future prospects of the free trade zone between the EAEU and Vietnam. The Russian state administration has taken part in organizing different events (official summits, roundtables, exhibitions, business forums), assisted in communication between the Russian and Vietnamese business communities, and provided information support. But despite some achievements by the FTA, there are still a lot of unsolved problems and so interaction between state administration and business seems to be a necessary condition for the improvement of Russian-Vietnamese economic cooperation.

The paper concerns administrative reform in the BRICS countries as a requirement of inclusive economic growth. The relationship between economic growth and equity describes the concept of inclusive development. In this respect, justice and quality of life is becoming one of its key factors and a stimulating cause of long-term economic development. The concept of an equitable (inclusive) growth strategy is based on the premise of the unity of governability, competitiveness and public policy through citizen participation. An important association of governability, competitiveness and fairness is participatory institutions. Four of these are crucial: strategic policy institutions; institutions of decentralization; institutions of “open government”, and accountability institutions. The paper, based on analysis of the BRICS, demonstrates that these not only create an environment for development, but are also tools for citizens’ participation.

Under the current conditions in forming the corps of civil servants, the professionalism and competence of civil servants comes to be of paramount importance. The pace of deterioration in the growth of knowledge has lead to objectively emerging contradictions between civil servants’ competency and continuously emerging new technologies. Therefore, continuous training is the basis for the constant improvement of knowledge and acquiring new socially important skills for civil servants in Kazakhstan. However, it oft en happens that in practice the planning of an educational process is carried out without a preliminary assessment of training needs, which leads to inefficiency in the whole learning process. The purpose of this article is to identify the main areas needed for the training of civil servants in Kazakhstan. This article is a report on a conducted study which focuses on the following research questions: (1) What are the common problems regarding knowledge and skills among civil servants? (2) What training content is currently required for civil servants? Research methods include online questionnaires and focus groups with civil servants, as well as interviews with international experts. Key areas of professional development in the civil service have been identifi ed based on the respondents' answers. The results confirm that civil servants universally recognize that certainly there are some gaps between what is required to perform their work completely and what they actually know. The focus and methodology of the training also requires critical attention.

Throughout the history of Russia, short periods of public administration decentralization have been replaced by long periods of centralization. In particular, and mainly with negative connotations, the tendency towards centralization in Russia – the building up of a predominantly unitary state and the departure from the principles of federalism, even in its asymmetric form – has been discussed in the last few years.
The article analyzes the reasons for the current tendency for the centralization of public administration in Russia. The main reasons, we believe, are: the command-administrative style of governance that was formed in Soviet times, supported both by the mentality of the political elite and the bureaucracy, and by the traditional paternalistic attitude of the population towards power; the lack of understanding by the center as to how to interact with the ethnic republics, aggravated by the fear of the disintegration of the country; and the existence of a centralized Budget and Tax Codes. As an illustrative example of the history and content of reasons for the centralization of governance, the interaction between the Federal Center and the Republic of Bashkortostan is considered, and the article focuses on analysis of the two main reasons for centralization.
It is alleged that in Russia the “pendulum” will not change direction from centralization to decentralization any time soon. However, in order to mitigate the negative consequences of excessive centralization and prevent spontaneous events, some measures are proposed to reduce excessive centralization and develop federalism. In particular, it is necessary to change the system of professional and additional professional education of civil servants, as well as to reduce the transaction costs of governance by redistributing a number of public administration functions between the Center and the Regions, and introducing some elements of the single-channel budgeting system used in China in 1980–1993.

The following paper deals with the issue of the Russian administrative reform of the 2000s. The subject of analysis is the relationship between the extent of inclusivity in the reform process and its outcomes. To study this relationship we start by focusing on the federal stage of the reform’s design, outlining institutions, involved actors and their strategies. We claim that due to the closed nature of the reform, its official Conception was highly incoherent. Following this, we turn our attention to the implementation of the reform in the Russian regions. We illustrate this process by outlining one case of the reform in the Republic of Karelia, based on interviews with representatives of bureaucracy, civil society and the expert community. Here we also demonstrate that greater engagement by interested groups results in better implementation of reform. Then we introduce simple regression to trace the relationship between two major directions of administrative reform – one based on the new public management idea of cost efficiency and the other grounded in the public governance call for greater community participation. Our model shows that these directions are hugely contradictory due to the logical incoherent Conception of the reform. We suggest some possible solutions to deal with this problem to some extent, which will require an even broader set of actors involved in the reform process. Therefore, looking at examples from the federal and regional dimensions of the Russian administrative reform, we argue that a more open regime with in a policy subsystem with a broader circle of participating actors will lead to a more coherent content of policy change and better implementation of the initial conception.

Mass media is a public communication channel for the government, as well as a detector of field situations, program observer, and reporter to the public on government performance. Responsibility attribution theory sees the presence of two types of attributions: causal attribution and maintenance attribution. This study examines the attribution of mass media to the Public Works Department, Tapin Regency, Republic of Indonesia. News coverage was collected from regional and national news sites between 2015 and 2017. A total of 30 news items are relevant for further analysis. Of these, 24 are known to attribute causal responsibilities to non-governmental actors, while 29 provide attribution of responsibility for maintenance to the government. However, only three stories show the government as an active actor solving the problem completely. These results indicate that the mass media are not interested in the results achieved by the government, but only look at the responses given to problems. The media did not report on the progress or performance of the government's response measures. Theoretically, this study has implications on the theory of attribution of responsibility by asserting that attribution also needs to be seen from temporal dimensions. It is important for government to make partnerships with mass media more actively. The originality of this research lies in the use of the theory of attribution of responsibilities in more detail to inform on the improvement of public administration.