Nonuniform Development of Municipalities
The paper is focused on uneven development of municipalities in Russia. A feasible method of assessing inequality of local development within regions is suggested and applied to four Russian regions. The analysis shows that in the late 1990s constant increase in inequality was observed, based on constructed municipal development/welfare indicators. Economic growth in that period had an uneven impact and did not create additional development opportunities for weak and economically stagnated municipalities.
Regional Poverty and Income Inequality in Central and Eastern Europe: Evidence from the Luxembourg Income Study
This paper reports levels of income inequality and poverty in four Central and Eastern European countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Russia. Unlike previous research on transition economies, we aggregate the detailed individual-level income surveys made available through the efforts of the Luxembourg Income Study at the regional level of analysis. Although national-level investigations have contributed much to our understanding of the income distribution dynamics, these studies mask intra-country variance in levels of income inequality and thus may not capture the true distribution of household income and accurately reflect individual well-being. Accordingly, we compute summary measures of inequality and relative poverty rates, using both local and national relative poverty lines, for the most recent waves of data available. We offer comparisons between regional and national median incomes and assess levels of inter- and intra-regional income inequality.
Comparison of a Radiometric Procedure with Conventional Methods for Identification of Neisseria
A radiometric procedure was compared with the conventional cystine tryptic agar (CTA) sugar fermentation method for identification of Neisseria species. Four different ATCC cultures of Neisseria were identified by both procedures with identical results. The only difference noted was that the radiometric procedure required 3 h for completion, whereas the conventional CTA sugar method required overnight incubation. The radiometric procedure was also compared with the fluorescent antibody (FA) and CTA methods for identification of Neisseria gonorrhoeae. The organisms examined were gram-negative, oxidase-positive diplococci isolated from 49 clinical specimens sent to the laboratory for bacteriological analysis. Results obtained by both CTA and FA procedures were comparable. However, the radioisotope method appeared to be superior to the other two methods in that only one isolate identified as positive by both the CTA and FA methods was not identified radiometrically, whereas four isolates positive by the radiometric method were not identified by the other two procedures. Thus, a total of seven more positive identifications were made radiometrically than by either of the two other methods. All positive identifications were confirmed by a reference laboratory. These results indicate that the radiometric procedure is more rapid and reliable as compared with both the CTA and direct FA methods and, thus, may serve as a valuable addition to the methodology available for diagnostic microbiology.