The authors proposed an original method of stress testing in statistical modeling of business activity based on the results of business tendency surveys to study possible scenarios for the development triggered by external unforeseen supply and demand shocks, as in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article also provides an overview of existing approaches in the field of stress testing and the construction of stress indices with an emphasis on methods based on vector autoregressive models and their various modifications. Thus, the article aims to adapt existing methods of macro-level stress testing for their use based on the results of business tendency surveys.

The basis for empirical calculations was the data from business tendency surveys of the leaders of Russian manufacturing enterprises, reflecting their combined estimates of the current state of business activity. The methods used in the article included: firstly, the formation of four composite indices based on the results of business tendency surveys from 2008 to March 2020, reflecting various aspects of business activity of enterprises (demand index, production index, financial index and employment index); secondly, the construction of the BVAR (Bayesian vector autoregression) model and its application for studying and comparing various forecast scenarios of index reactions to market shocks.

The results of the study, forecasts of the dynamics of indices were obtained as a reaction to four possible shock scenarios: short-term, V-, W-, and U-shaped. Moreover, for each of the scenarios, cases of shocks from the side of demand, production and their simultaneous impact are presented.

The conclusions based on the results of this study point to the key role of demand in the dynamics of all the considered indices and to the relatively greater sensitivity of the employment index in relation to the demand index and the finance index in relation to the production index. W-shaped shock was the worst of the four scenarios considered.

Conclusions based on the study results indicate the vital role of demand in the dynamics of all the indices under consideration, the Wshaped shock, as the worst of the considered scenarios, as well as the relatively higher sensitivity of the employment index to the demand index and the finance index to the production index.

The article presents the results of a study aimed at generalizing the sources of data, available in Russia, that characterizes a significant but little-studied phenomenon of family migration. The paper considers data from the Main Directorate for Migration Issues of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Russia on issued temporary residence permits (TRP) and acquisition of citizenship, Rosstat materials on the number of marriages with foreigners, as well as statistics on migration flows, which indicate family reasons. Considerable attention is given to the analysis of the Main Directorate for Migration Issues data on issued TRP and citizenship acquisition, on family reunification grounds. Based on the analyzed information, it is concluded that family migration is the major part of the flow of foreigners receiving TRP, and its share amounts to at least 35% of the total. Taking into account that a significant part of the TRPs is issued to the accompanying family members of the participants of the State Programme to Assist Voluntary Resettlement of Compatriots Living Abroad, the share of family migration can be increased to almost 50% of the TRP recipients. The percentage of migrants who acquired citizenship based on family ties with Russian citizens also amounts to about 36% of the annual flow and taking into account family members of participants of the State Program it makes almost 60% of all foreigners naturalized in 2014-2018.

Analyzing the Russian statistics on citizenship acquisition available since 2010, the author notes that after the changes in the citizenship law in early 2010s, citizens of states that do not have international agreements with Russia actively use marriages with Russian citizens to simplify citizenship acquisition, and the number of such cases is growing rapidly. The basic growth rates of this category of naturalized migrants in 2018 compared to the level of 2010 reached 300 times among the citizens of Tajikistan, 110 times among the citizens of Moldova and almost 60 times among the citizens of Azerbaijan. The author suggests that there is an expansion of the practice of marriages of convenience to overcome the complexities of Russian immigration law. This hypothesis needs to be tested. It is also necessary to study the phenomenon of “transnational marriages”. The disparity in the number of foreigners, men and women who married Russian citizens, revealed by Rosstat data, also requires further study. On average, there are 15 foreign grooms per 10 foreign brides, for Tajikistan citizens this ratio amounts to 32, for Azerbaijan citizens 26, for citizens of Uzbekistan 17 and Moldova 14. The article ends with an analysis of Rosstat’s annual reports on the reasons for move and shows a limited potential of this information. The author makes recommendations for the development of administrative statistics and sample surveys to study family migration and use new types of data in research.

The article provides a brief overview of the background of constructing composite leading indicators (CLI) for Russia; the paper defines key indicators which currently are calculated and published monthly; they can be put in practice to monitor the Russian economy. The underlying methodological approaches are analyzed, along with their advantages and disadvantages. The importance of accounting for a factor of regular or irregular updates and revisions of methods for calculating the CLI is emphasized. Due to them not only the current but also the “historical” dynamics of the indices occasionally change. The paper compares various CLI components and reveals both similarities and differences in the notion of the cyclical dynamics of individual components, reaching the point that the same indicators depending on the methodology are considered as leading, or as lagging. A set of “core” indicators included in the calculation of almost all Russian CLIs is determined; the author also noted those indicators that are widely used in other countries but not yet in Russia, for various reasons.

Special attention is paid to the problems of dating economic cycle turning points, in particular, those arising from different notions of the very concept of the economic cycle. Dating using formal statistical methods, firstly, is mostly determined by purely technical (and not substantive) nuances, and secondly, it often changes retroactively when revising historical time series. Analysis of global experience indicates that the way out of this impasse can be the detecting of cyclical turning points based on the decisions of the special expert council, whose sole tasks include dating cyclical peaks and troughs. The article describes methodological approaches that the Economic Cycle Dating Committee (Russian Dating Committee, RDC) under the Association of Russian Economic Think Tanks (ARETT), is supposed to follow.

The final part of the article analyzes the ability of various Russian CLIs to timely warn when a new phase of the economic cycle is approaching, especially the impending recession. It is shown that expert opinions on the future dynamics of the Russian economy, contained in monthly press releases, are often more accurate than the conclusions that can be obtained based on the CLI trajectory using purely formal decision rules. On this basis, it is concluded that the existing Russian CLIs can be improved; this calls for clarification and finally fixing the dating of cyclical turning points (peaks and troughs), as well as for conducting additional research to identify various economic and financial indicators as the leading, synchronous or lagging indicators of the Russian economic cycle.

The international agenda for the development of monitoring of digital transformation stimulates the development of a statistical methodology for measuring phenomena and processes in the digital economy. The barrier to the formation of a set of interrelated and comparable indicators of the development of the digital economy is the lack of a definition of this concept that would satisfy all interested parties.

To date, experts from various fields of science have proposed a wide range of definitions of the digital economy. Based on the various properties and effects of digitalization, experts characterize the digital economy not only as a phenomenon in economic activity but also as a sociocultural phenomenon. Many of the proposed definitions are theoretical in nature and do not fully satisfy the needs of empirical research.

The objective of this study is to formulate a definition of the digital economy for statistical research.

Therefore, the authors reviewed the works analyzing various definitions of the digital economy, and, accordingly, the sources that proposed definitions of the digital economy.

Due to plethora of digital economy definitions, to reveal the essence of this concept the authors used statistical text analysis (Text Mining) tools, which made it possible to identify a set of key terms defining digital economy. For analysis, was built a text corpus, consisting of 105 English-language and Russian-language definitions taken from various sources, including documents of state strategic planning, publications of international organizations, analytical materials of consulting companies and articles of individual authors.

Thus, the study analyzed the concept of the digital economy for the period and nature of origin, and also proposed an approach based on which an operational definition of the digital economy was developed that meets the relevant principles. However, to identify the digital economy as an object of statistical research, along with the proposed definition, it is necessary to develop a classification of elements of the infrastructure of the digital economy, all of which will allow the formation of an agreed system of tatistical indicators.

The paper focuses on the primary sources of information on Russia’s foreign trade. The objective of the study is to describe the main sources of data on foreign trade in goods and services, and compare them according to such criteria as time horizon, specification by types of goods and services, the breakdown of data by country and region, and the data format.

The methodology tools rely on the possibility of applying databases for various user tasks (such as operative analysis, international comparisons, and studying the structure of foreign trade by types of goods and services and by partner countries).

The author shows that none of the databases meets all the criteria. To obtain a high-quality result, it is necessary to combine information from different sources. The paper demonstrates the problems of the incompleteness of the monthly data in the UN Comtrade database and uncertainty with the classifier at the junction of 2016-2017 in the Federal Customs Service TSVT database. The author reveals the data gaps in the UN Comtrade database for Russia for some commodity groups. The article presents a comparison of Bank of Russia, OECD, WTO, and UN publications.

The conclusions are given in the form of recommendations on the use of the databases depending on the users’ requirements according to the speed of data publication, availability of data for international comparisons, and the need to reflect the structure of Russia’s foreign trade by type of goods and services.

The analysis reveals individual structural components of foreign trade turnover and preferences in the use of information bases. For trade in goods, the author recommends a simultaneous usage of the Federal Customs Service TSVT database and the UN Comtrade database; for trade in services the use of the Bank of Russia, OECD or WTO databases (depending on the user’s task).

The purpose of the article is to present the results of the author’s research on best current practices in studying the effectiveness of the country’s foreign trade (on the example of the Republic of Belarus) and wording of proposals for improving approaches to its statistical assessment.

The author analyzes the traditional methodology directions to evaluate the effectiveness of activities of the national economic authorities by the state. The article provides some modern approaches to assessing the efficiency of foreign trade at the state level. Current econometric methods for estimating the efficiency of foreign trade which are not quite popular with domestic authors but are extensively used by foreign researchers are examined in detail. Based on actual data, the author conducted the analysis of foreign trade efficiency for the EAEU member countries using gravity models of foreign trade with dummy variables and the stochastic frontier method. The results indicate a positive trend in increasing the efficiency of foreign trade activities of the Republic of Belarus and Russia for the period from 2011 to 2019 with the other EAEU, CIS member states, as well as with Lithuania, Latvia and Poland.

In the final section of the article, are formulated the directions for improving national statistics of foreign trade based on international experience in terms of its segment, which reflects the effectiveness of foreign economic activity.

The last decade was characterized by the improvement of the financial systems’ monitoring mechanism at the national and international levels aimed at making effective decisions on financial stabilisation. The purpose of this study is to assess the sustainability of banking sectors of the leading economically developed and developing countries for the period 2009-2018, taking into account the processes occurring in the global economy and international financial markets.

The research applied the International Monetary Fund methodology for assessing the stability of depository institutions and used the IMF database containing financial soundness indicators of the banking sectors in the studied countries. The economic and statistical analysis of financial soundness indicators of the banking sectors made it possible to explain the influence of economic conditions on the level and dynamics of the banks’ performance indicators as well as to identify the strengths and problems of the banking systems.

The results of the study indicate an increase in the sustainability of the developed countries’ banking sectors, which is confirmed by the growing trends of capital adequacy and the quality of bank loan portfolios. The main problem of the developed countries is stably low profitability which, in the long term, could lead to a decrease in the banks’ capitalisation and their inability to maintain economic growth.

A positive trend in the banking sectors of the developing countries is the recovery of capital adequacy, whereas the negative trend is a decrease in the quality of loan portfolios and profitability indicators. High credit risks and insufficient capitalisation represent the vulnerabilities of the developing countries’ banking sectors, while the increased volatility of financial soundness indicators, especially liquidity, is caused by the impact of the external trade and financial conditions.

The results of this research could be used by analysts and regulators in macroeconomic calculations and when developing supervisory stress testing models, as well as by bank managers for performing internal stress tests and strategic business planning.