RUDN Journal of Economics

The sanctions imposed on Russia by Western countries in 2022 acted as a catalyst for a large-scale restructuring of trade flows across the Eurasian region. While aimed at isolating the Russian economy, these restrictions ultimately failed to achieve their goal but instead provoked a significant transformation of the system of international economic relations. In this new environment, Central Asia has acquired strategic importance, evolving into a key partner for Russia and a vital transit hub for trade exchange. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of the structural changes in Russia’s trade and economic relations with the Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan) between 2020 and 2024. The study aims to assess the impact of sanctions on the reorientation of Russia’s trade flows towards Central Asia following 2022. It employs a comparative analysis of customs statistics and data from international organizations (ITC Trade Map, World Bank) to track dynamics in trade volume and structure before and after the imposition of sanctions. Particular attention is paid to the analysis of new commodity niches, mechanisms of parallel imports, and the prospects for further economic integration within the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). The central hypothesis posits that the growth in Russia’s trade turnover with Central Asian countries was differential in nature and determined by specific factors unique to each country in the region. The findings confirm this hypothesis, identifying key drivers such as logistics rerouting and import substitution. The study concludes that, despite persistent sanctions risks and infrastructure limitations, Central Asia has solidified its role as a strategically important economic partner for Russia, with relations continuing an upward trajectory.

Amid slowing global economic growth and declining external demand, several traditionally export-led Asian markets try to diversify their economic growth sources and expand household consumption expenditures. The largest Asian markets possess significant but not fully realized consumer potential, which is largely shaped by regional characteristics - particularly the considerable difference in household consumption expenditures’ dependency on the dynamics of their key determinants. The study aims to quantitatively assess this dependency for a group of the 10 largest consumer markets in Asia - China, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam - and compare them with global trends in order to evaluate the region’s potential to become a global consumption center and, consequently, to turn Asian consumption into a driver of both regional and global growth. The methodological basis of the study is a fixed-effects regression model calculated for current and permanent income specifications. It was found that the income elasticity of consumption in Asia is significantly lower compared to the global trend. A key barrier preventing private consumption from becoming a driver of regional growth remains the traditional high household saving rate and a households’ preference for long-term stability over short-term income growth. As a result, despite rapid income growth and the middle class expansion, these factors are likely to contribute to sustained consumer demand growth only in the medium term - over a horizon of five years or more. Inflation, on the other hand, has an opposite effect on private consumption dynamics: when prices rise, households are more inclined to direct short-term income gains toward additional consumption. The inertial export orientation in several Asian economies remains an obstacle to the shift toward consumption-led growth. However, the rapid development of financial systems is a stimulating factor. An important factor influencing the dynamics of private consumption is the gender structure of the population. In all societies, women are drivers of consumer demand, but this effect is significantly stronger in Asia.

This study investigates the feasibility of introducing a supranational settlement instrument - the BRICS Currency Unit (BCU) - designed to reduce exchange-rate volatility, enhance financial sovereignty, and strengthen trade and investment flows among BRICS and BRICS+ members. The research models the real effective exchange rates (REERs) of BRICS countries using data from the Bank for International Settlements. Macroeconomic drivers-including GDP growth, inflation, current-account balances, foreign direct investment inflows, reserves, and the share of intra-BRICS trade-were incorporated into the modeling. Five alternative weighting schemes for the BCU were tested to identify the most stable and diversified composition. The analysis confirmed that REER dynamics across BRICS are shaped by both shared and country-specific macroeconomic factors, complicating the creation of a unified framework. Among tested approaches, GDP-growth-based weighting minimized correlation with domestic shocks and produced the most stable basket. This variant of the BCU demonstrated the strongest diversification properties, effectively mitigating currency risks and enhancing predictability for long-term trade and investment contracts. The findings support the potential of the BCU as a hedging tool and settlement mechanism that can reduce transaction costs, stabilize pricing in energy, agriculture, and manufacturing, and increase competitiveness of BRICS economies. Extending its application to BRICS+ partners would further diversify settlement options, reduce dependency on the US dollar, and reinforce the role of BRICS in the global economy.

Analysis of historical market data from 2020 to 2024 reveals a profound structural shift in Indonesia’s energy landscape: domestic crude production plummeted by 17.96%, while oil demand simultaneously surged by 14.57%. This widening supply-demand gap has severely intensified national energy security concerns, pushing Indonesia’s net deficit to approximately 1.0 million barrels per day (bpd). This critical gap directly pressures fiscal stability due to escalating fuel subsidy costs and exposes the macroeconomy to global price shocks. Given the market’s inherent non-linearity, driven by WTI price volatility and frequent, policy-led structural shifts (e.g., the deployment of AI for subsidized fuel control and the B40 biodiesel mandate), traditional linear models like ARIMA are severely limited in their predictive accuracy. We propose the Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) deep learning network as a methodologically superior approach. The LSTM’s recurrent architecture, with its specialized gate mechanisms, is uniquely suited to capture the non-linear dynamics and long-term temporal dependencies of complex energy time series data. To ensure the reliability of our findings, model robustness was explicitly ensured via k-fold cross-validation and a thorough discussion of inherent dataset size limitations was provided, directly addressing methodological concerns. Empirical findings confirm the LSTM model’s significant superiority over the conventional benchmark, achieving a 57.24% reduction in Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) and significantly lower Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) compared to the ARIMA baseline. This high-precision forecast provides critical foresight for Indonesian policymakers, enabling proactive management of fiscal risk, targeted adjustments to foreign exchange reserves, and the successful acceleration of the national Indonesia Oil and Gas (IOG) 4.0 strategy toward long-term energy resilience.

The study aims to summarize the best international practices of Internet marketing in healthcare and identify the prospects for adapting these practices to the specifics and modern needs of the socio-economic system of Russia to improve the quality of life in it. It contains an empirical study based on official statistics for 2025. An assessment of the quality of life in modern Russia from the standpoint of healthcare was made, revealing the incomplete disclosure of the potential for its improvement based on Internet marketing. As a result, an econometric model of improving the quality of life with the development of Internet marketing in healthcare was obtained, which clarified the consequences for healthcare as a component of the quality of life, which lead to its internetization and explained the influence of various factors of the internetization of society and the economy on the healthcare system. It was concluded that for the most complete realization of the potential of healthcare in the field of improving the quality of life, it is necessary to develop Internet marketing in healthcare. The theoretical contribution is to develop a new approach to the development of healthcare to improve the quality of life, based on Internet marketing. The advantage of the new approach is the systematic nature of marketization and internetization in healthcare, as well as improved coordination of market and digital reforms SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT in the Russian healthcare system. In accordance with the author’s approach, the optimal combination of factors of the internetization of society and the economy was selected and scientific and practical recommendations were proposed to reveal the potential of Internet marketing in the healthcare system in Russia, and a forecast was made of the consequences of the internetization of healthcare for its development and quality of life in Russia. The application of the proposed applied solutions will reduce the burden on the state budget for financing healthcare, increase the quality and availability of medical services in Russia, and also increase the efficiency of the implementation of the state program for the development of healthcare in Russia until 2030-2036.

The relevance of the topic is related to the need to develop technological product platforms (hereinafter CCI) and industrial ecosystems (hereinafter PE), based on the transformation of cardinal innovative solutions using digital technologies to ensure the creation of highly competitive products developed and manufactured to replace analogues previously imported due to high sanctions pressure. The development of CCI and PE requires the development and creation of economic tools for transforming the potentials of innovative solutions for the mechanism of managing the transition of an organization to a position of technological leadership through the production and commercialization of radically new products. The research objectives include analyzing existing approaches to transformation and identifying their main types in industrial ecosystems, developing recommendations for managing the organization’s transition to a position of technological leadership through the production and commercialization of radically new products. The purpose of this research is to study the role and effectiveness of digital technologies in the processes of transformation into industrial platforms and ecosystems as part of strategies for transforming the potential of innovative solutions. It is assumed that an integrated approach can significantly increase the company’s competitiveness in the international market and accelerate the growth of its economic performance. The research methods are content analysis of sources and economic and mathematical modeling of network multilateral effects of platforms. As a result, the effects of industrial platforms and ecosystems were studied, and a mechanism for the development of an organization based on a platform approach was formed.

The study examines the importance of organizing and evaluating the dynamics of public-private partnership (PPP) projects in the tourism sector, taking into account the development of infrastructure facilities in tourist clusters. The study presents aspects of diagnostics and the most important issues of monitoring the functioning of regional tourism clusters based on improving the efficiency of using investment resources of concession agreements. The role of the system of public financing and risk management based on the principles of public-private partnership for the development of the tourism sector and tourism clusters, which are considering this form of financing for the further use of tourism potential and improvement of tourism policy in their regions, is shown. Using the mechanism of concession agreements, federal subjects use the opportunity to build large infrastructure facilities for tourism in conditions of budget deficit, which allows them to develop the economy and social sphere of these subjects. These results make it possible to identify measures to initiate the activities of the executive authorities of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation and municipal bodies of local self-government to more proactively carry out work to attract project investments of public-private partnerships to create favorable conditions for the development of tourism infrastructure, improve the investment climate and conduct tourism business.