AP27510485: Price shocks and production localization of diabetes drugs: a comparative analysis of Kazakhstan and Russia. 147,000 USD for 2025-2027. Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan.
More than 10.5% of the adult population worldwide has diabetes. In Kazakhstan, 7% of the adult population has diabetes - the largest share among Central Asian countries. In Kazakhstan, the government spending on medical provisions for treating diabetes reaches 90M USD annually, exceeding public spending on drugs for treating cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Nevertheless, the supply of diabetes drugs is limited in Kazakhstan, and most of these drugs are imported. On the contrary, Russia localized the production of many diabetes drugs. The dependence on international producers makes Kazakhstan’s pharmaceutical market vulnerable to price shocks induced by currency exchange rates and supply chain disruption. This project aims to study the price sensitivity of diabetes drugs to the currency exchange rates and the effectiveness of policies that can mitigate this sensitivity, such as production localization and price caps, in the comparative setting of Kazakhstan and Russia.
The project chases three goals:
1. Conduct a comparative analysis of regulations and describe retail and public procurement markets for diabetes drugs in Kazakhstan and Russia.
2. Empirically study how changes in the cost of imports associated with the currency exchange rates are passed through to the prices in retail and public procurement markets for diabetes drugs.
3. Empirically study the effect of production localization for some diabetes drugs in a setting of regulated prices.
040225FD4707: Public opinion and economic behavior in wartime: evidence from Russia. 75,000 USD for 2025-2027. Nazarbayev University, Faculty-development competitive research grants program
How reliable are public opinion polls in wartime censorship in non-democratic states? Academic debates on this question have arisen with renewed vigor after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, when the Russian state media declared that the majority of the Russian population supported the invasion. If wartime public opinion is reliable, could war's economic distress and benefits affect attitudes toward war and war participation? The project will study these questions by using more than 40 waves of public opinion polls from 2022-2026 in Russia and several objective behavioral measures of the Russian population at the subnational level, including protest activity, war participation, online search, and financial behavior.
Project goals. The project has two goals, focusing on the understanding of public opinion in wartime
1. Analyze the reliability of public opinion in wartime.
2. Analyze the effects of economic shocks and casualties on public opinion and the economic incentives of participation in the war.