2019. vol. 23. No. 3

The article considers two theories that are half a century apart from each other, justifying state intervention in market relations – Richard Musgrave's «Theory of Meritorious Goods» and Richard Thaler's «Libertarian Paternalism». Within the framework of a comparative metho­dological study, the sources and prerequisites of these theoretical constructions, the design of state intervention characteristic of each of them, as well as criticism of the meritorious and li­bertarian paternalism, are discussed. The thesis that both theories are based on the same initial assumptions is substantiated, they assume the same goals of state intervention and the conclusion is formulated – in these theories there is more in common than different. They are distinguished only by the institutional design of «pushing»: in one case, it is about creating economic incentives for the right individual choice, in the other – the manipulation of the «default option», which uses an arsenal of psychological tools.

It is shown that with all the novelty, «new paternalism» is, in fact, a «new meritorics», based not only on the assumption of irrationality of individuals, but its psychological explanation, created by behavioral economists and which has become part of the mainstream, which determines the answer to the question of article. At the same time, this answer does not create a holistic picture, and the negative connotation of paternalism is still preserved in economic science. The article formulates an additional consideration, revealing another side of the success of libertarian paternalism: the «language game», inherent in Musgrave’s theory was outdated in the early 1950s, and, therefore, this theory was among the «forgotten» ones, and the concept of Thaler and his colleagues corresponds to the new «language game», the key elements of which are the word «liberalism» and speech constructions, corresponding to the modern language and terminology of the mainstream of economic theory.

Relevance. In 2009, tax reform was carried out in Kazakhstan and basic tax rates were reduced. Over the past period, the level of state budget expenditures declined to 19% of GDP. The need to ensure the inclusive economic growth requires an increase in the tax burden and improvement in the redistributive function of the budget.

The purpose of this study is to quantify the limits of increasing fiscal burden, which will not hinder economic growth and fiscal function of budget, by taking into account the reduction in the width of the fiscal inconsistencies’ zone from 2010 to 2018.

Hypothesis. It is expected that the calculations carried out in the paper, using the approaches of the theoretical model of the Laffer curve and fiscal analysis, will provide a real corridor within which it will be possible to increase the tax burden in the economy of Kazakhstan.

The methodological basis of the study aims to establish the relationship between tax burden, economic growth and budget tax revenues, which are used in the theoretical model of «Tax Laffer curve». In order to construct the production and fiscal points of the Laffer curve for the Kazakhstani economy, we applied the methods of fiscal analysis using production and institutional functions of Balatsky E.V. We used the data of the Committee on Statistics of the Ministry of National Economy of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

As a result of the study, the authors estimated the maximum points of the production function curve  and the fiscal function curve . The comparison with the actual value of the tax burden allowed quantifying the potential increase of tax rate in Kazakhstan. But the re­vealed trend of reducing fiscal inconsistencies zone’s width for 2010–2018 required an adju­stment of the results, taking into account the low degree of freedom for the possible manipulation of tax rates.

Therefore we carried out additional calculations with the prolongation of the natural limit of the fiscal burden, i.e. 1st kind of the Laffer points. The results show that the stage-wise increase in tax-to-GDP ratio amounting to 4–5% within 10 years from the level of 2018 is possible without any negative effect on economic growth and tax collection.

The results of the study can be used to implement tax policy in Kazakhstan.

This paper aims at modeling the proposed 5-year rise in retirement age for Russian economy. The primary goal of the paper is to analyze the effect of this pension reform on the major macroeconomic features of the Russian economy as well as benefits and losses of different age group of agents. The problem is solved by making simulations in the setting of a global CGE-OLG model. The proposed model takes into account the long-run demographic trends forecasted by the UN as well as the budget structure of each of the 17 regions included: consumption taxes, income tax, payroll tax, corporate tax and natural revenues and expenditures on education, healthcare, pensions and other spending. Having overlapping generation is the model allows us to estimate changes in welfare of different age groups of agents from any economic policy. The results of the simulations show that the effect of raising the retirement age on economic growth appears to be limited. However, we observe an increase in the level of consumption and welfare for all the generation except for those that are close to reaching the retirement age when the reform is implemented. A more pronounced effect of raising the retirement age is that it helps keeping the government budget balanced in the long run. As an alternative a gradual pension system capitalization scenario is considered.

Airlines are subject to a set of internal and external risks and also have a considerable impact on world economy, being responsible for mobility of the population and the movement of loads. Despite a significant role the industry of civil air transportation is low-marginal, and financial stability of airlines often is under the threat.

Since the beginning of autumn 2019 in Europe the number of bankrupt airlines has been growing. Thus, the number of carriers claiming inability to perform duties to clients due to financial problems reached five airlines in the first month of autumn: Thomas Cook Airlines and Thomas Cook Airlines Scandinavia, Aigle Azur, XL Airways, Adria Airways.

In view of considerable number of bankruptcies of the airlines and negative effects connected with their defaults there is a question of definition of effective measures for forecasting of probability of bankruptcy, for application preventive the world supervisory authorities and interested persons. Authors of work investigated techniques of prediction of bankruptcies of the enterprises, with emphasis on airline and comparison classical a logit of model and a Bayesian quantile regression on data from the reporting of airlines for 2009–2018 is made. In a research the possibility of application of mathematical models for forecasting in the global market of air transportation is for the first time considered, aggregating the companies on 3 integrated geographical regions. A result of work is the model considering in itself indicators of Net Income, Quick ratio, load factor, the turnover of assets and geographical accessory of the company giving prediction accuracy to 90%. This model considering a limited set of financial and operational metrics can be easily applied by supervisory authorities and other interested parties (partners) to premature identification of defaults of airlines in view of simplicity of implementation and availability of the majority of data in open access without connection to specialized databases.

Models for time series are very important for the stock market. Fuzzy Takagi – Sugeno models (functional fuzzy systems) are a promising and already common approach, in which different regression dependencies are used for different areas of variation of certain parameters, and soft switching is performed using the fuzzy logic rules. This is the advantage of this approach over conventional stochastic models. Each Takagi-Sugeno model is based on its set of fuzzy rules. These models can be viewed as a generalization of classical econometric models, if one such model corresponds to one fuzzy rule. This paper studies the possibility of using the wavelet transform and fuzzy Takagi – Sugeno model to analyze the dynamics of stock prices for the following Russian companies: Gazprom, Sberbank, Magnit, Yandex and Aeroflot; this approach was previously used to study some foreign stock markets. Wavelet analysis quite often acts as a tool for signal processing, including time series, as it allows for a multi-level approximation. In this paper, the Takagi – Sugeno model is based on untransformed data as well as data transformed using Haar wavelets. Fuzzy clustering is used to construct membership functions. Calculations show that the use of wavelets often improves the predictive characteristics of the model.

At present, the class of NP-complete problems is represented not only by the «classical» issue of the travelling salesman problem and many tasks in the theory of graphs and networks, resolved into it, but also by the problems of nonlinear and stochastic optimization, including, in the discrete setting. The peculiarity of these problems is the lack of constructive algorithms forfinding the optimal solution in polynomial time from the dimension of the problem, which «dooms» the researcher to use non-constructive methods in solving these problems, for example, the exhaustive algorithm. However, these algorithms, being applied to discrete optimization problems, do not allow to solve the problem in a complex way: for example, such methods do not let us obtain dual constraints estimation that are important for the subsequent analysis of the optimal solution. In the article, for a wide class of problems of production and financial planning, which, in the production plan, are reduced to the problems of discrete nonlinear convex optimization of large dimension, the author offers an original numerical method for finding a quasi-optimal solution with a high (predetermined) accuracy of approximation to the optimum. For the specified class of problems, the proposed method is universal, i.e. it can be applied without additional adaptation of the numerical procedure.