The global experience of leading companies indicates that successful development of a firm – in particular, of a consulting firm – and improvement of its performance are impossible without a properly formulated strategy as a set of measures aimed at achieving a certain goal. The relevance of this article lies in the fact that operation of any enterprise is accompanied by risks, which necessitates formation and application of a business strategy within the competences of various departments. Attempts to research and develop the business strategy for a consulting company are made in this article. The current businesses are run in a highly competitive environment. Taking adequate decisions requires a deep, comprehensive assessment of the situation and a reliable forecast of the outcome. The key stages of developing a business strategy for a consulting company are identified, possible alternatives to the strategic choice are defined, measures to monitor the implementation of strategic decisions are found, and foreign and Russian examples of building the business strategy for a consulting company are provided.

The international practice among leading companies indicates that there is no successful development and sound company performance improvement, particularly, in tourism, without a proper strategy as a complex of measures tailored to achieve the set goal. Technology development in tourism represents a leading trend of the global economy, shaped by the restructuring of modern society. The Russian Federation public policy has a clear set economic goal in the tourism sector, which is to transform tourism as a competitive, innovative stable and profitable sector of national business. Tourism is characterised by a complicated relationship system between the providers and consumers of services, between travel companies and their competitors and between business partners. A travel company's activities in the market include finding a niche; tourism product development; determining the scope of services; refinement of pricing; expansion of promotion activities, research; ensuring investment; cooperation with other companies; government relations. Today, various methods and models are intensely adopted in the development of business management systems in tourism, which reflects the increased competitiveness of products in the tourism market. The paper discusses development models for travel companies, methods for solving optimisation problems of the regional territorial arrangement of tourism and hotel business and establishes the influence of external environment factors over the creation of a hotel operation.

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Today, issues of discrimination against people by age due to the aging population of most European countries attract the attention of world and domestic science and are a controversial and multifaceted problem of a social, economic and moral nature. In this context, the consideration of ageism as an independent and peculiar object of applied research is undoubtedly of great scientific and practical interest. A review of points of view on the category of “ageism” gave reason to believe that today there are a number of “white spots” and gaps of a methodological nature that do not allow us to fully and statistically correctly characterize the state and characteristics of age discrimination as a social problem, but also to interpret the available data, to create a reliable picture of the world in relation to the transformation of the value orientations of society.

The article considers the issues of statistical accounting of of persons of child age who have fallen into difficult life situation. The paper сarries out a comparison of the conceptual apparatus, revealing such a public category as “children” and gradation parameters of specified population groups from the point of view of revealing the object of study. The authors justify the need to characterize the subject of the study – a difficult life situation in which both an adult and a child can get, highlight particularly the age group “teenagers”. The study presents features of difficult life situations in which children and adolescents can get. The article lists the areas of occurrence of complex circumstances in which difficult life situations are formed and developed. Based on the analysis, the authors propose and substantiate an original system of indicators for assessing persons of child age who have fallen into a difficult life situation.