Accept sincere congratulations on coming 2015 New Year and Merry Christmas! We have achieved a lot together in the past year, and let the coming year will be for you to stage new discoveries, interesting meetings and events. Let promising ideas, friends, and inspiration to help you reach new personal heights. In this New Year, I would like to wish you, your family and friends health, happiness, good luck, prosperity and new successes. Happy New Year and Merry Christmas! With best regards, Director of the Center of  Advanced Economic Researches in the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan M.R. Safiullin

In the article there are systematized the existing assessment techniques of the budgetary policy efficiency at the budget of a different level from the point of view of their applicability to municipalities and also come to light their advantages and the shortcomings, allowing to define conditions of their use in practice. A method of an assessment of budgetary policy efficiency, based on matrix approach is proposed in this article. Assessment of budgetary policy of municipalities of the Republic of Tatarstan which include large cities is carried out according to this method. On the OX axis in this case it is offered to postpone the given indicator of the budget expenses to the territory per capita, on the OY axis - an integrated assessment of the population life quality on the territory, reflecting social development. According to the results of the carried-out analysis there are drawn conclusions on the development directions of the budgetary policy in the largest municipal regions of the Republic of Tatarstan. 

 Dear colleagues! Let us inform you about the international publication written by the candidate of sociological sciences, the assistant to sociology chair of the Kazan (Volga Region) federal university, the manager of high-quality research department of the Center of Advanced Economic Research in the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan Polina Ermolaeva. Based on the environmental case of the 2013 Universiade in Kazan, this research highlights that despite the variety of tools employed for citizen engagement, the key procedures can be claimed as ‘false dialogues’. The study identifies the key factors for such a discrepancy. The main external barriers for post-socialist Russian cities include the limited time frame for building sports venues, poor execution of environmental legislation, and complicated bureaucratic procedures maintained by governmental actors. The internal factors are polarized positions in the community due to the complexity of the project, the gap between the citizen environmental concern and actual engagement in environmentally friendly behaviours associated with the lack of the environmental knowledge, time, and financial resources, lack of knowledge of the environmental impact assessment process, and dominance of the material and paternalistic values and low trust in government proponents.

Dear colleagues! Let us introduce the article on "Analysis of the Impact of Environmental Stress on Social-and-Economic Well-Being of Population: Development of the Methodology and its Testing» publisheв in the magazine "Middle-East Journal of Scientific Research." Authors: Marat Rashitovich Safiullin, Leonid Alekseevich Elshin and Alina Ildarovna Shakirova - Center for Advanced Economic Research Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Tatarstan, Kazan, Russia