In the initial period of the COVID 19 pandemic (February–September 2020), Japan succeeded in minimizing the mortality rate and reducing the damage to the economy. The Japanese experience has both positive and negative aspects. Among the G7 countries, Japan recorded the best

The past decade has brought remarkable changes to the economic cooperation of North-West Japan (Hokkaido and Japan Sea coastal prefectures) and the Russian Far East, such as fast growth of intra-regional trade, great structural changes, a huge increase in the number of cooperating companies and thousands of Russians coming to Japanese ports, which until recently were closed to them. Similar trends were observed in Asian, European and American regions involved in trade with Russia. In Japan, the initial “Siberian euphoria” has gradually been replaced by a much more realistic approach. The reason is that liberalization of trade, globalization and regional development created a number of problems: the prevalence of geopolitical over economic considerations in energy projects, the growth of the shadow sector in certain arrears of mutual trade, the very uneven distribution of benefits and losses from cross-border cooperation and the deep differences of public opinion in Japan and Russia. This paper argues that in terms of public finance theory, these problems can be considered as examples of a failure of market mechanisms, shadow economy, negative externalities and asymmetric information, which can only be solved by effective public policy and state intervention.

Higher education is broadly recognized as one of the most significant components of modern social and economic development. The quality of education at a university depends on factors such as how the university is managed, how effective the management decisions are, and what consequences they have for the advancement of society. While the consequences have numerous hardly equitable aspects, this article hypothesizes that it is possible to build a synthetic model for the assessment of university management, that takes into account a full range of existing quantitative and qualitative effects. The study aims to identify the relationship between the quality of management and the performance variables needed to build the model. The research methodology includes the application of econometric analysis for the formation, ranking, and determination of point values of a balanced scorecard (BSC). Finally, the findings of this research led to the creation of a workable model that allows both direct and reverse translation of a quantitative management assessment into a qualitative (verbal) one. Further, the verification using the available empirical data confirmed the model’s validity. We would thus recommend this model for solving a whole range of university management issues, especially in areas with predominant ripple and indirect effects, i.e., in the interaction of higher education entities with regional and local communities.