Tatiana N. Litvinova’s research while affiliated with Volgograd State University and other places

The research justifies the advantages and develops recommendations for making the most optimal decisions in foreign economic activities of business using big data and AI. Thus, the authors consider the advanced practices of the top 20 countries most active in using big data and AI in 2023. The research establishes correlations between management professionalism, protectionism, and automation based on big data and AI with the outcomes of businesses’ foreign economic activities. The optimality of the corresponding managerial decisions is highlighted. As a result, the authors substantiated the preference for using big data and AI to improve decision-making practices in foreign economic activities. The authors identified the advantages of these technologies, including the increased global presence of national brands and the accelerated growth of goods exports. The authors propose a new technocratic model and a set of original recommendations for making optimal decisions in foreign economic activities of a business using big data and AI. The implementation of these recommendations will provide various benefits, including reduced uncertainty in the foreign economic situation, increased flexibility, and rationalization of managerial decisions. This approach will ensure the most optimal decisions in the foreign economic activities of a business through the use of big data and AI.

This paper is aimed at determining the role of higher education in change management of human capital in support of sustainable development of high-tech production. Regression analysis was used to process the official statistics of the world bank for 2020 and knowledge for all for 2022 (105 countries). As a result, we substantiated the important place of higher education in the system of the factors of high-tech production development. We compiled expected alternative consequences of higher education development for high-tech production. The main conclusion is that the key role of higher education for the development of human capital of high-tech production consists in the financing and popularisation of higher education, as well as the provision of inclusiveness in an educational environment and flexibility of the educational process. The key results of this paper are as follows. The theoretical significance of the obtained results and conclusions is that they opened a “black box” of human capital development in the system of higher education, explaining how it supports the development of high-tech production. The developed SAP-LAP model of higher education for change management of human capital presented a novel authors’ vision of higher education management and universities as flexible dynamic systems of macro- and micro-levels, accordingly. The practical significance of the developed recommendations for the improvement of state regulation of higher education is that they allow optimising the consequences of higher education development for high-tech production. The managerial significance of the paper is that the authors’ recommendations will allow improving the practice of university management (in Russia and other countries) in support of high-tech production development.

The change in economic patterns, the emergence of new forms of entrepreneurship, and the diversification of production cause the need to create new mechanisms of legal regulation of relations and transformation of existing ones. One such mechanism is competition. The research solves the problems of legal regulation of the exercise of competition as a form of exercising the right to entrepreneurial activity and identifies and systematizes its limits and restrictions. The use of a system of logically grounded universal (dialectical, system approach, and determinism) methods allowed the authors to establish the regularities of competition development, distinguish the legal nature of similar phenomena, and systematize new scientific knowledge about competition. Using the mechanism of legal regulation of entrepreneurial activity as a form of exercising the right to conduct entrepreneurial activity, the study of the function of competition provides conclusions about the legal nature of competition and distinguishes the positive and negative factors of its existence. The authors established the correlation with the categories of good faith and bad faith competition and entrepreneurial activity. The signs of behavior qualifying it as a restriction of competition are formulated. The comparative analysis of restriction of competition and abuse of rights allowed the authors to draw conclusions about their nonidentity. Based on considering the influence of competition on public and private interests, the authors revealed the means of the mechanism of legal regulation of competition.

When creating a model of entrepreneurial activity, it is necessary to study the main elements of the structure of such a model to identify their legal essence, distinguish them from similar legal categories, establish key features, and formulate proposals aimed at improving the current legislation. The key means and ways to achieve the goal is to study the categories of good faith and reasonableness of entrepreneurial activity using system approach, determinism, modeling, abstraction, concretization, analogy, formal-legal method, comparative-legal method, and the method of legal forecasting. The research raises problems related to the fundamental categories of realization of the subjective right to conduct entrepreneurial activity and the categories of good faith and reasonableness. A comparative analysis with antagonisms (bad faith and unreasonable behavior) is carried out. The study of good faith and reasonable exercise of the right by subjects of entrepreneurial activity regulation made it possible to express a negative attitude to the used legal means in the form of establishing prohibitions, as well as the applied legislative technique. The authors formulated proposals to optimize the system of legal regulation of relations.

This research explores the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles into entrepreneurship management, focusing on the agro-industrial complex (AIC) in Russia within the context of the new business environment (2022–2023). Using regression analysis, the author carries out econometric modeling of the contribution of ESG management to the sustainability of market positions of Russian enterprises in the new business environment. The study was conducted from February 24, 2022, to January 24, 2023, based on the statistics of the Moscow Exchange Small and Medium Capitalization Index (MCXSM) and the Moscow Exchange RSPP Responsibility and Transparency Index (MRRT). As a result, the author substantiates the expediency of expanding the practice of ESG management in Russian enterprises. It is proved that ESG management significantly contributes to the sustainability of market positions (capitalization) of Russian enterprises in the new business environment (2022–2023). On this basis, the author proposes integrating ESG principles in the practice of management of enterprises in the agro-industrial complex (AIC), for which a set of the author’s recommendations (using agricultural enterprises as an example) is proposed. The practical significance of the author’s conclusions and recommendations is related to the fact that they allow Russian enterprises to better adapt to the new business environment and increase the sustainability of their market positions.

The article attempts to overcome the lack of protectionism policy underlying the existing approach to managing sustainable business development, which is due to the fact that such a policy limits the influence of the external environment on business, as well as eliminates its incentives to adaptation and reduces business flexibility. The research methodology is based on the use of the method of regression analysis. Based on the representative international statistics by IMD and the UN for 2021 (60 countries), we use regression analysis to determine the dependence of the indicators of the sustainable development of the business—GDP and SDG 9—on the factors of protectionism and the use of Big Data and analytics based on AI. The reliability of the econometric modeling results is verified by determining their correspondence to the Gauss–Markov theorem. The key conclusion is that change management based on smart technologies contributes to sustainable business development, expressed in an increase in GDP and the result of SDG 9 implementation. The significance of the managerial aspect of the article is that, using the progressive methodology of SAP–LAP, we compile a SAP–LAP model of change management based on smart technologies for sustainable business development, which makes it possible to increase its flexibility and adaptability. The main result of this paper consists in the substantiation of the critical role of the flexibility of business as the main condition for its sustainable development. The paper’s novelty lies in the development of a new approach to the management of the sustainable development of the business, which specific feature is change management based on smart technologies—which ensures increased flexibility of the business. The state economic policy implications are connected with the necessity to refuse protectionism in favor of the deregulation of markets to allow competition to create natural stimuli for the increase in the flexibility of business through change management.