2019 Issue №4

The article analyses the behaviour of the participants of the world gold market. Special attention is paid to the London gold fixing and its replacement by the London electronic auction in an attempt to establish the benchmark price of gold under the influence of short-term geopolitical impulses. The au­thor puts forward a hypothesis that different impulses of geopolitical process­es, their frequency and the level of manifestation influence differently the dy­namics of the world gold market. These factors determine the movement and distribution of gold reserves in different geographical places, ‘safe havens’, and can lead to an increase the number of gold bars, futures contracts or, on the contrary, to get rid of them. They can determine the fluctuations of the world price of gold. The author substantiates the idea that short-term geopolit­ical disturbances have an impact on the process of revaluation of the precious metal. The second part of the article aims to identify the main regularities of the impact of geopolitical impulses on the behaviour of participants of gold pricing. This aim is achieved by using observation, analogy, comparative and retrospective analysis. The author analyses the behavioural reaction of partic­ipants of the London gold fixing and the London electronic auction to the emergence of new centres of military conflicts and "colour revolutions, as well as the intentions of some world leaders to break the existing military and stra­tegic balance of forces in an attempt to introduce a new world order. The au­thor determines the conditions, which allow participants of the world gold market to become subjects of modern geopolitics.

There is an increasing need for the assessment of urban development rates in the world. In modern Russia, this need is reaffirmed by the transfor­mation of regional economies, the economic acceleration of many major cities, and by the active introduction of strategic management tools (KPI, etc.). The article anal­yses the current indexes and rankings of urban development. The author ex­plored the main methodological approaches to the assessment of the rate of urban development. One of the topical issues of contemporary research on this subject in Russia is an attempt to create comprehensive methods of as­sessing urban de­velopment without taking into account the specifics of urban management and the scale of regional economy. In this regard, the paper pro­vides a critical analy­sis of approaches to urban development indicators, index­es and rankings. The author drew conclusions about the most optimal ap­proaches towards the for­mation and use of data in city management in Russia. The author used gen­eral scientific research methods (logical and structural analysis and the meth­od of generalization), and statistical analysis (grouping, comparison and gen­eralization). The results of the study include recommen­dations for city data management and for decision-making in knowledge man­agement.