The purpose of this study is to identify trends in the development of the tourism sector and assess the potential of the applied methodology for generating official statistical information; to take these trends into account fully and accurately. The objectives include analyzing factors affecting tourism services development in Russia and abroad, as well as identifying trends requiring adaptation of the methodology for statistical surveys of tourism services.

The materials and methods. The study includes empirical data and its analysis in the context of tourism statistics theory and the digitalization of economic relations based on digital platforms. The methodological support for the study comes from materials of the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO) and national statistical services on tourism statistics. The sources of factual data include Rosstat, Russian Public Opinion Research Center, Russian professional tourism organizations, and SPARKInterfax.

Research results: the digitalization factor of economic relations has a significant impact on the development of tourism services market worldwide. Regional factors of the state policy of supporting tourism and some foreign countries to limit economic activity have an additional impact on the Russian tourism industry. The combined influence of factors determines the stable trends of tourism services market, which include the growth of domestic tourism, independent tourism, as well as an increase in the self-employed engaged in individual professional activities. An analysis of the modern statistical tools revealed a number of problems in the statistical survey on the accounting of tourist services provided to tourists by self-employed and individual accommodation facilities.

Conclusion. Under the influence of several factors, changes are taking place in the field of tourism, which must be considered in the development of the methodology of tourism statistics. Digital platforms are a major sales channel for travel services, estimated at 30% of the market volume. Digital platforms, providing almost one third of the tourist transaction market, have data with a high potential to improve the quality of statistical surveys. The advantages of the data captured by the platforms are that they contain information about the location, quality, time, and cost of travel services. The realization of these advantages requires the development of appropriate regulatory and methodological support.

The relevance of research. The development of the financial services sector was one of the areas of long-term modernization and economic development in Russia during the transition to a “modern” economic growth regime. Numerous studies by economists and historians of various fields and schools utilize statistical data in one way or another.

The purpose of the research is to characterize the institutional trajectory of the development of national statistics of key branches of the financial services sector, as a system evolving under the influence of specific interests of key social factors in a certain historical context.

Materials. The following branches of financial statistics are considered separately: budgets of various levels of public authority; monetary policy instruments; banking sector; securities market. All of them were more or less supervised by the financial department of Russia/USSR, whose divisions collected and published the bulk of the relevant statistical data. Part of this work was implemented by supervised organizations, as well as by authorized authors. The central government’s budget performance reports were audited and published in great detail by the Office of the state control from the late 1860s until 1916. Separate reference books were compiled by the Central Statistical Committee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, but not by the Central Statistical Office. Non-government organizations were also active. The author also draws on early studies of the financial statements of public companies, and the published sources from the archival funds of the Bank of Russia.

Methodology. The proposed institutional-evolutionary approach assumes that the matrix of statistical observation (accounting) is shaped by the goals and objectives, set by the state and public entities in a given historical period. The research is based on the modernization paradigm, which is genetically linked to Marxism and institutionalism. In this context, the development of institutions of the national sectoral statistics had become one of the manifestations of the state’s increasing role in the economy and social sphere and its will to play a more active role in managing modernization processes. The study also utilizes a number of concepts of institutional economic history.

Results. The achievements and failures in the examined branches of the national financial statistics, as well as its general characteristics and trends, are formulated as conclusions:

1) The development trajectory of institutions of Russian financial statistics was markedly different from the development trajectory of both the national statistics as a whole and statistics in other sectors and industries (levelling the gap with economically advanced countries).

2) The Central statistical service only occasionally tried to enter into institutional competition with the financial department.

3) The dominance of departmental financial statistics, with the small role of the central statistical agency, was a fairly rational institutional choice in the context of institutional experimentation and borrowing. The concentration of statistical work in the financial department ensured sufficiently strong links between statistical activities and the tasks of public administration, thus reducing the transaction costs of selecting and implementing institutional innovations.

4) The information openness of Russian financial statistics increased in the late imperial period, but declined significantly in the early Soviet period (New Economic Policy) and practically returned to the state of secrecy of the pre-reform period.

The article is devoted to conceptual methods for determining the priority of performing maintenance and repair of equipment of the electric power infrastructure of an industrial enterprise, as an important factor in managing the company’s fixed assets. A computational procedure for a comprehensive comparative assessment of the criticality of performing maintenance on individual units of the same type of equipment is presented and described in order to rationalize the operating and investment budgets of an enterprise using the example of an electric power facility of JSC “Vyksa metallurgical plant”. The results of the approbation of the proposed computational procedure are presented, which made it possible to distribute the volume of the repair program of the same type of electrical equipment of the enterprise, taking into account the magnitude of its impact on the continuity of the technological process.

The purpose of the study. Performing an assessment of the economic efficiency of the implemented maintenance and repair programs for the fleet of the same type of equipment of the electric power infrastructure of an industrial enterprise and making their rating based on the application of an original computational procedure for a comprehensive comparative assessment using weighting coefficients – indexes.

Materials and methods. To carry out this research, the author applied the method of a comprehensive comparative assessment of the economic efficiency of maintenance and repair programs applied to the same type of equipment of the electric power infrastructure of the enterprise. The assessment was carried out using two weighting coefficients – indicators: the “criticality coefficient” and the “damage coefficient”. The collection of the initial data necessary for the study was carried out based on the analysis of the operable, dispatch, accounting, operational, technical and financial reporting documentation of the industrial enterprise unit operating and maintaining the equipment fleet in question. The author applied the following methods of processing the data collected during the study: rating assessment, normalization and generalization of results. The results of the study are presented using the graphical method.

Results. The level of technical and economic impact on the production process was assessed for each evaluated group of the same type of equipment of the power supply unit of an industrial enterprise included in the sample. The evaluation results can be useful in determining the priority of maintenance, allocation of operational and investment financial resources.

Conclusion. Applying the proposed comprehensive assessment system and testing it, when determining repair priorities on the existing equipment of the electric power infrastructure of the industrial enterprise of JSC “Vyksa metallurgical plant”, groups of individual units of electric grid equipment with a higher criticality were identified in comparison with other sample units, while receiving a standardized volume of technical maintenance and units with a minimum level of criticality are determined, the complete abandonment of technical maintenance of which, in the medium term, will in no way affect the technical and economic indexes of the technological process implemented at the enterprise. The study revealed that there is a reserve for improving the efficiency of operating the equipment of the electric power infrastructure of an industrial enterprise by reducing the maintenance costs of certain least critical units.

The purpose of the study is to establish and evaluate statistical relationships between the indexes of the hotel industry as a type of economic activity, and its relationship with other socio-economic indexes of the development of the Russian Federation using mathematical and statistical methods. The relevance of the study is determined by the needs of using official statistics data to identify intra-system connections in the country’s economy as a system or in its individual branches – subsystems, using statistical methods.

Materials and methods. The source material for the study was the official data of the Federal State Statistics Service for the period 2000-2023. The article uses methods of mathematical statistics – correlation and regression analysis of variation series of the hotel industry indexes and other socio-economic indexes of the Russian Federation development.

Results. The authors have expressed the statistical relationship between the indexes of the development of the hotel industry and other indexes of the development of the country’s economy in quantitative form. High values of correlation coefficients (more than 0.80) of the paired dependence are established for: the number of people accommodated in hotels and similar accommodation facilities with a subsistence minimum and an average wage in the Russian Federation; the country’s total GDP - with GDP per capita, with a subsistence minimum, an average wage and a total number of people employed in production; GDP per capita - with a minimum subsistence level, with an average wage and the total number of people employed in production. A structural model of correlations between the studied indexes has been developed. For some indexes, dependencies have been identified that adequately (with a probability level of 0.95) reflect statistical data for the analyzed period, which can be used to predict the development of the Russian Federation.

Conclusion. The conducted research allowed us to conclude that the use of statistical methods in economics should be expanded, as they allow us to obtain new additional knowledge about the objects under study, as well as evidence of the reliability of the results. The novelty of the research lies in quantifying the interrelationships of the characteristics of the hotel industry as a type of economic activity, its external links with some socio-economic indexes of the country, as well as the intra-systemic links of individual indexes of the development of the Russian Federation, in describing the mathematical dependence of the dynamics of changes in some indexes. The practical significance lies in the possibility of using the results in planning the pace of development of socio-economic indexes, in identifying and evaluating the internal and external relationships of systems selected from real life for research.

Purpose of the study. The established priorities of hydrocarbon neutrality in the leading countries of the world and the uncertainty of the prospects for the realization of hydrocarbons make topical studies aimed at analyzing the impact of consumption of fossil fuels and other energy sources on economic growth. The aim of the research is to study the long-term impact of energy consumption by natural sources of hydrocarbons and alternative sources on economic growth in countries of the world using regression analysis.

Research methods. The research methodology consists of a ShapiroWilk test for normal distribution and a Generalized Linear model (GLM) method. A generalized linear model of the relationship between primary consumption of different sources of energy, final consumption of steel, cereal crops and economic growth in countries from different regions of the world: America, Middle East, Europe, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Asia was constructed.

Results. The result of the study is the different direction of the impact of the consumption of natural hydrocarbon sources and alternative energy sources on economic growth in the regions of the world. Most observations have shown that there is no relationship between the consumption of natural sources of hydrocarbons and alternative energy in general and economic growth. The obtained results show that a decrease in the consumption of natural hydrocarbons sources is accompanied by the economic growth in a small group of European countries, while for some countries in South America and Asia, a dependence of economic growth on an increase in the consumption of such sources was found.

Conclusion. The identified dependence of economic growth on various energy sources is presumably due to the economic type and export orientation of certain countries. In some cases, reduced coal consumption has caused economic growth, but a simultaneous decrease in oil and gas consumption may have a negative impact on economic growth.

This article covers the theoretical aspects of mergers and acquisitions. Since mergers and acquisitions are integration processes, it becomes a necessary tool for a dynamically developing business. Mergers and acquisitions transactions allow increasing the value of a business, creating an effective and competitive product, and obtaining unique competitive advantages.

Particular attention is paid to mergers and acquisitions as a form of consolidation in the financial sector, including commercial banks, and the features and motives of consolidation are identified. In this regard, such concepts as “consolidation”, “concentration”, “centralization” are defined. The processes of mergers and acquisitions in the financial system of the Republic of Kazakhstan are considered: an analysis of some mergers and acquisitions transactions in the financial sector of the Republic of Kazakhstan is conducted.

 To identify the characteristic features of these processes in the Republic of Kazakhstan, we analyzed such significant transactions as the integration of JSC “Kazkommertsbank” with BTA Bank in 2014 and the voluntary reorganization of JSC “Kazkommertsbank” in the form of a merger with JSC “Halyk Bank” of Kazakhstan in 2018.

 In our opinion, the deal regarding the purchase of a controlling stake in Hepsiburada by JSC “Kaspi.kz” in January 2025 is of interest. The analysis presents the main financial indexes of the participating banks before and after the deal, identifies the reasons for the change in indexes, and calculates the synergy of the JSC “Kaspi.kz” deal.

The author’s conclusions are presented on the solution of existing problems in mergers and acquisitions in the financial sector.

The purpose of this paper is a comprehensive comparative analysis of various mathemati-cal methods for forecasting a key index of industrial development – the value added of industry in the Russian Federation. The research aims to assess the effectiveness and accuracy of tradi-tional and modern approaches in the context of real, crisisprone economic dynamics. Determin-ing the most reliable tools for making medium-term forecasts is important to increase the validity of macroeconomic decisions.

The empirical basis of the study was the official statistics of the World Bank for the peri-od from 2002 to 2021. Indexes such as industrial value added, gross capital formation, and the share of medium- and high-tech exports were selected for modeling. To ensure stationarity and eliminate the trend component, all-time series were transformed using second differences, which was confirmed by the Dickey-Fuller test. The comparative analysis was carried out between three methods: the method of extrapolation based on historical trends, a multifactorial linear economet-ric model estimated by the least squares method, and a neural network model with long short-term memory (LSTM). The quality of the models was assessed by comparing forecasts for the periods 2011-2012 and 2019-2021 with actual data.

The results of the study revealed a significant superiority of modern methods over tradi-tional extrapolation, which gave a significant and increasing range of forecast values. The econ-ometric model showed significantly higher and more stable accuracy, adequately reflecting the main linear dependencies. The best results were demonstrated by the LSTM model, which most accurately predicted the trajectory of recovery after the 2008-2010 crisis and correctly recorded a slowdown in growth ahead of the 2020 crisis. However, none of the models was able to predict the extreme recession of 2020 caused by the global external shock (the COVID-19 pandemic), which indicates the limitations of any formalized approach in the face of unforeseen structural changes.

The analysis makes it possible to conclude that deep learning architectures, in particular LSTM models, are highly effective and promising for forecasting complex macroeconomic in-dexes. These models are capable of establishing nonlinear dependencies and longterm effects in time series. Econometric models retain their value as a reliable and interpretable tool for analyzing stable linear relationships. The results obtained confirm that the use of LSTM models with opti-mized parameters can significantly improve the accuracy of macroeconomic forecasts, which is an important condition for the formation of scientifically sound industrial and economic policy.

This research investigates the impact of foreign investment and oil prices on the trade balance between Azerbaijan and Russia over the period 1998 – 2024 using annual time-series data and econometric methods.

The purpose of the research. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of foreign investment and oil prices on the trade balance between Azerbaijan and Russia during the period 1998 –2024. By applying various econometric techniques, the study aims to identify the direction, strength, and nature of the relationships among these key economic variables. The research seeks to determine how fluctuations in oil prices and investment flows influence bilateral trade performance, to reveal causal interlinkages, and to provide policy insights for enhancing economic diversification and strengthening trade cooperation between two countries.

Materials and methodology. This study utilizes annual time-series data covering the period from 1998 to 2024 to analyze the impact of foreign investment and oil prices on the trade balance between Azerbaijan and Russia. The data were collected from official statistical sources, including the State Statistical Committee of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the Central Bank of Azerbaijan, the World Bank, and international energy databases.The research employs a combination of descriptive and econometric methods to ensure comprehensive analysis. Descriptive statistics and correlation analysis were first used to summarize the data and examine initial relationships among the variables. The multiple linear regression model was then applied to quantify the effects of Azerbaijan’s foreign investment, Russia’s foreign investment, and global oil prices on the trade balance between two countries. To verify the validity and reliability of the model, several diagnostic tests were performed, including tests for autocorrelation, heteroskedasticity, and normality of residuals. The study also applies Granger causality analysis to identify the direction of causal relationships among the variables. All the calculations are made in Microsoft Excel and Eviews 12 application software packages.

Results. The empirical results indicate that Azerbaijan’s foreign investment has the strongest and most significant positive effect on the trade balance between Azerbaijan and Russia, suggesting that domestic capital inflows enhance trade performance. Oil prices also exert a positive impact, confirming that higher oil prices stimulate investment activity and trade turnover.

Conclusion. The findings emphasize the strategic importance of oil prices in determining investment and trade patterns. To ensure sustainable economic growth and reduce vulnerability to external shocks, Azerbaijan and Russia should pursue greater economic diversification, promote mutual investment opportunities, and strengthen bilateral cooperation beyond the energy sector.