Sectoral Adaptation and Strategic Resilience: The Impact of Sanctions on Russian Corporate Performance (2014–2021)

Subject. The article considers the impact of US and Western sanctions on the economy and citizens of the Russian Federation after the start of the special military operation in Ukraine. Objectives. Our aim is to analyze the impact of sanctions on the Russian economy and its financial system, to identify economic determinants enabling to restrain this impact. Methods. The study draws on methods of scientific and information base, synthesis, grouping of obtained data. The methodological and theoretical basis consists of works of domestic and foreign scientists on the impact of economic sanctions on the development of individual countries and the world economy. Results. The study shows that the Russian economy has proved to be much more resilient to the impact of sanctions. The sustainability of Russia's economic system rests on four main factors: (1) sales of our export goods, due to price hikes and the absence of a complete embargo; (2) sustainable domestic consumption through extensive support to businesses and citizens, and tightening the State regulation; (3) structure and composition of GDP (the real sector of the Russian economy in GDP is almost 38%); (4) preservation and expansion of friendly relations with major powers that refused to join the restrictive measures of Western countries. Conclusions. The Bank of Russia should stimulate the country's economy, annually increase the amount of money supply, reduce the key rate up to 3% per annum by the end of 2023. This will increase investments in the economy and provide annual GDP growth.

Environmental challenges in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta characterized by adverse impacts of climate change, upstream hydropower development and localized dyke expansion present imperatives for rural farmers to “learn to adapt.” However, little is known about how learning contributes to improving their capacity in adapting to these “wicked” problems. This study investigates potential effects of farmers’ learning on their adaptive capacity, utilizing nine focus group discussions, 33 interviews, and a structured survey of 300 farmers. The exploratory factor analysis produced two factors for social learning: (1) learning through social interactions and (2) self-reflection, and one factor for adaptive capacity. The regression results show that the social learning factors have significantly positive effects on adaptive capacity. Farmers with a higher level of social learning are likely to demonstrate higher adaptive capacity. The findings call for policy considerations to promote learning in a broader context of the delta to enhance local capacity.

This study investigates the multifaceted relationship between international sanctions­ and economic freedom, treating it not simply as an economic ­construct but as a fundamental pillar of societal well-being. Drawing upon a panel dataset of 21 countries subjected to sanctions between 2002 and 2022, we analyze the impact of sanctions — both economic and non-economic — on overall and component-level economic freedom. Methodologically, we integrate Panel-Corrected Standard Errors, Feasible Generalized Least Squares, and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling, thereby addressing issues such as heteroskedasticity, autocorrelation, and the complexity of multiple interdependent relationships. Our findings reveal a ­consistent negative effect of sanctions on economic freedom, although the severity and channels of impact vary according to the nature and source of the sanctions, as well as the institutional and temporal contexts. Notably, sanctions imposed by the United Nations emerge as particularly constraining for property rights and monetary­ freedom, while trade and financial restrictions curtail investment and market openness. At the same time, sanctioned states demonstrate varying degrees of resilience, adapting policies and seeking alternative markets to mitigate sanctions. These outcomes under­line the dual nature of sanctions as powerful tools of international diplomacy that can inadvertently undermine economic freedom. By illuminating these dynamics, our study offers insights for policymakers and scholars alike, emphasizing the importance of tailoring sanctions to limit harm to economic liberties while pursuing legitimate foreign policy objectives.

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of recent times, with worldwide economic, societal, and environmental impacts. In response to these challenges, the European Union (EU) proposed the EU Green Deal which sets a blueprint that commits on transforming the EU into the first climate neutral continent by 2050. To this end, innovative solutions for climate-change adaptation and mitigation measures must be implemented in regional and local scales. The H2020 Green Deal project IMPETUS aims to develop and validate a coherent multi-scale, multi-level, cross-sectoral adaptation framework for climate change, paving the way towards a climate-neutral and sustainable future. This will be achieved by building on resilience knowledge and by co-designing together with local communities and stakeholders, innovative packages of methodological, technical, governance and financial solutions. Two such solutions developed within the project are a) the strategic resilience and multi-hazard management tool for identifying dynamic climate adaptation pathways and b) the climate change hot-spot identification and prioritization tool. Through a co-creation approach, stakeholders identify region-specific indicators and metrics of interest that describe climate risk exposure, vulnerability, and adaptation capacity. The hot-spot analysis based on these metrics utilizes collections of spatiotemporal datasets, including future climate scenarios and projections, that describe key parameters from the human and climate dimensions, able to identify hot-spots associated with different climatic and socioeconomic futures. The hot-spot explorer tool is an EU-wide web service and can be used as a screening tool for policymakers to prioritize regions for development of regional adaptations pathways, using the dynamic adaptation pathways tool. A regionally suitable pallet of intervention measures is identified from stakeholder engagement. The pallet is stress-tested for assessing regional climate resilience, under a multitude of different future scenarios, with the objective to generate pathways of progressive implementations of intervention packages that improve the specified indicators and metrics. Some of the intervention options are also operationalized in pilot case studies within the project, such as the employment of sewer mining units in the wastewater system of East Attica for water reuse. The pathways are dynamic and adaptative to changing future conditions, as there are a) key monitored parameters for a region with alarms associated to decision points involving intervention measure implementations, and b) a contingency response module that supports stakeholders to select interventions from different pathways. These tools engage policymakers and stakeholders in order to identify climate change hot-spots within EU, prioritize them, identify suitable intervention measures, and analyze their regions to generate strategic plans for adaptation pathways towards the common climate resilience goal.AcknowledgementThis work is supported by IMPETUS research project, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement  No. 101037084.

The study is devoted to the issues of ensuring information security for small business entities. The article highlights the theoretical and methodological foundations for the development of an information security system for small enterprises in the context of economic digitalization and the growing intensity of cyber threats. The relevance of the research is driven by the need to create effective protective mechanisms under conditions of limited access to financial, technological, and human resources typical for small businesses. In today’s digital environment, information assets are becoming a strategic resource, and their protection is regarded as both a technical and managerial task that requires a systematic approach. The construction of an adaptive, scalable, and efficient information security system gains particular importance in the context of enterprises’ strategic resilience and competitiveness. The study explores the theoretical foundations of information security architecture development, taking into account international standards, the specifics of small business operations, and modern risk management approaches. Special attention is paid to the interrelation of technical, organizational, and human resource aspects of security system functioning, as well as to the necessity of integrating modern technologies for monitoring, authentication, backup, and analytics. The feasibility of building a structural-component framework for the information security system is substantiated, considering the functional segmentation of subsystems, threat typologies, and scalability options. Furthermore, the article addresses the formalization of security policies and the enhancement of personnel awareness as key elements in mitigating the human factor. An adapted TOGAF-based approach is proposed for the strategic design of the information security architecture, enabling the formalization of security policy implementation under the resource constraints of small businesses and ensuring its alignment with the dynamic digital environment. The proposed approach serves as a foundation for systematizing information security management practices.

Based on statistical data, data from ministries and departments, and other available sources, the article analyzes the impact of collective Western sanctions against Russia and their possible consequences. Purposes. To assess the impact of sanctions on the Russian economy, their goals, causes, development scenarios, and ways to contain them. Methodology. General scientific approaches and methods, analysis of reporting and statistical data, scientific literature devoted to the study of the sanctions impact on Russia. The methods of logical and economic-statistical analysis are applied. Results. The impact of collective Western sanctions on the Russian economy after the outbreak of its conflict in Ukraine is considered. The goals and causes of the sanctions war have been identified. Each group of these sanctions has been studied in detail, and their impact on the Russian economy and technological sovereignty has been determined. The Russian economy is still coping better with the sanctions than the countries that imposed them expected. Possible scenarios for further development in these conditions have been identified, and who receives the most benefits from these sanctions. But time is playing against Russia and into the hands of its geopolitical opponents. It is urgently necessary to change the priorities of the macroeconomic interests of the state, the model of development and the structure of the economy. Conclusions. In the context of the restrictive actions of the West, the return of technological sovereignty and the structural adaptation of the economy are in great demand now more than ever. The necessary first steps in this direction are proposed.

35a - Supporting women in mining: diversity and inclusion

Adapting to Adversity: Unraveling the nexus between vulnerability and well-being in coastal Bangladesh

Navigating climate crises in the Great Barrier Reef

With the beginning of a new phase of military conflict between Russia and Ukraine in 2022, third countries, especially countries of the former Soviet Union (post-Soviet space), are expected to suffer from Western sanctions and Russian countermeasures due to disruption or disruptions in supply chains. The systematization of literary sources on this topic proves that several studies are currently devoted to analysing the impact of international sanctions against Russia on the situation in the Baltic region. At the same time, the issue of the effects of Russian sanctions on the functioning of Azerbaijan in this context has yet to be analyzed. However, close relations between Russia and Azerbaijan and the growing importance of Azerbaijan for European energy security are essential conditions for this case study. This article aims to investigate the economic impact of sanctions on Azerbaijan through a thematic analysis of expert opinions on social media platforms (e.g. Facebook, LinkedIn) and websites dedicated to media coverage of this issue. This study analyzed 134 qualitative sources collected between February and July 2022, of which 84% of the data was in text format, while 16% was in video format. A technical assessment of expert opinion found that international trade, services (such as banking and transport), agriculture, monetary issues (inflation due to rising prices of imported products and the exchange rate) and migrants were the most discussed issues and causes of concern among experts. Significant disruptions in the Russian economy raise severe concerns about Azerbaijan’s fruit and vegetable exports, wheat imports, banking operations, inflation, reduced remittances (from Russia) and labor migration (from Russia to Azerbaijan). This study examines these patterns in light of prior expectations, suggests further research, and theorizes possible reasons for the observed patterns.

The deliberate fragmentation of the world market as a result of the establishment of a global sanctions regime provoked a complete transition of both the Russian and the entire world economy to non-stationary modes of operation, one of the fundamental features of which are the deformations of the global monetary and financial system, which only two years ago seemed to have no alternative to the one based on the US dollar. One of the consequences of these events is the objective strengthening of the role of gold as the basis for the stability of national reserves and a single base in the transition to a plurality of global means of payment. The only source of replenishing gold reserves is gold mining, especially for modern Russia, which Western sanctions have effectively cut off from the world trade in gold. Russia has traditionally been one of the world leaders in terms of gold reserves and resources, ranking third in world production. Gold production in Russia increased by a factor of 1.5 in 2012–2021, facilitated by the growth rate of the Russian gold price relative to the global price due to the rise in the dollar exchange rate after 2014. At the same time, the share of gold in Russia’s gold and foreign exchange reserves is three times smaller than that of developed countries. This article discusses the problems of production localised in the regions of the Russian Far East and Siberia, its impact on the socio-economic development of these regions and the role of gold in the country’s economy. The impact of sanctions on the circulation of precious metals, including gold, is assessed. The authors assess the effects of external sanctions and the macroeconomic policy of the Russian Central Bank in terms of replenishing gold reserves and the volatility of the Russian ruble on gold production, the structure of gold consumption, and the economic situation in the gold mining industry

The conflict in eastern Ukraine and Western economic sanctions against Russia gave an additional push to the process of geographical reorientation of Russian foreign economic contacts that was already under way. Western sanctions against Russia after incorporation of Crimea in March 2014 were pretty modest. The impact of sanctions on Russian economy was controversial. On the one hand, there was a direct and mostly indirect effect, leading to lower trade and greater outflow of capital from Russia. Elimination of the mistakes of economic policy created a stronger upward push for the national economy than the outflow of capital, decline in oil prices and Western economic sanctions. The gravity theory of international trade predicts that trade between two countries is proportional to its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and is in inverse proportion to the distance between them. The annual increase in GDP in East Asia is considerably higher than that in Europe.

Anti-Russian sanctions have an additional impact on Russian companies. Due to the rapid change in the situation and the development of information situations, it is becoming difficult for investors to make investment decisions. This determines the relevance of the study, the purpose of which is to determine the impact of information about sanctions on stock indices of lower industries. The empirical basis for the study of indicators includes 67 thousand news items from the Interfax platform for 2014–2023. The following were used as control measures: the price of Brent oil futures, the dollar-ruble exchange rate, and the RUONIA benchmark interest rate. The indices of MOEKEU (electric power industry), MOEKS (chemistry and oil chemistry), MOEKOG (oil and gas) are considered. All data were obtained for the period from 01.01.2014 to 31.12.2023. The research methodology is based on mathematical modeling using the BERTopic topic modeling algorithm. Four main topics of sanctions were identified: “Anti-sanctions policy and sanctions evasion”, “Western sanctions”, “Sanctions against industry-specific companies”, “Financial market”. The impact on industry indices was assessed using the random forest algorithm and GARCH analysis. It has been proven that sanctions have less impact on the indices of those industries that are sufficiently autonomous in Russia. Investors pay attention to entrepreneurial topic, and not to the sanctions rhetoric. Negative information can lead to their irrational behavior. The period of maximum impact of sanctions was also determined: a month from the date of release of information about the introduction of sanctions. As a result, the following conclusions were made: 1) when referring to industry indices, not all news about sanctions is taken into account, as are messages on the topic of manufacturers, taking into account industry specifics; 2) for the index of the chemical and petrochemical sector of the greatest initiative, which has an anti-sanction policy index; 3) the energy plumbing sector is less developed. The results of the study can be useful for determining investment directions

Anemia in pregnancy has been a topic of interest for researchers due to its potential impact on various adverse pregnancy outcomes. This study aims to explore the relationship between anemia and adverse pregnancy outcomes such as preterm birth, low birth weight, and maternal mortality. We conducted both a systematic review and a meta-analysis on the associations between anemia during pregnancy and adverse pregnancy outcomes. We searched Chinese databases (CNKI, Wanfang, CBM, VIP) and English ones (Cochrane Library, PubMed, Embase, Web of Science). Two researcher-authors independently assessed study quality with the Newcastle-Ottawa Scale. After extracting data, we analyzed heterogeneity and used a random-effects model for higher heterogeneity and a fixed-effects model for low heterogeneity in the meta-analysis while also systematically synthesizing and narratively describing findings in the systematic review. A total of 31 cohort studies were included. Meta-analysis showed that the risk of postpartum hemorrhage [RR [95% CI], 2.76 [1.63, 4.66]], premature rupture of membranes (PROM) [1.94 (1.26, 3.00)], preterm delivery [1.51 (1.33, 1.72)], low birth weight (LBW) [1.40 (1.19, 1.63)], cesarean section[1.33 (1.02, 1.74)], gestational hypertension[1.28 (1.14, 1.44)] and neonatal asphyxia[1.21 (1.07, 1.37)] was higher in the group of anemia in pregnancy than in the control group. Maternal anemia is associated with an increased risk of seven adverse pregnancy outcomes: postpartum hemorrhage, PROM, preterm delivery, LBW, cesarean section, gestational hypertension and neonatal asphyxia. Appropriate nutritional supplementation and screening for anemia before and during pregnancy are recommended to improve maternal health and manage adverse pregnancy outcomes.

IntroductionGestational diabetes mellitus (GDM) is associated with adverse pregnancy outcomes, including adverse outcomes for both the mother and the fetus. Different diagnostic criteria are used for GDM, and it is...