FINANCIAL CRIME TRENDS IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

Central and Eastern Europe, as political and military strategists found to their frustration during the Cold War, is an extremely large and diffuse area. It contains the blocs of Central Europe, Eastern Europe, the Russian Federation and the Balkans. For the purposes of this paper, there is a general section and then a focus on two countries. These are the Russian Federation, arguably one of the main areas of organised crime impacting upon a global scale, and Romania, one of the latest Candidate Countries for joining the EU.     

Happiness in transition: An empirical study on Eastern Europe

This paper analyzes the determinants of life satisfaction in a pooled data set of representative individual survey data from seven East European countries collected during the early phase of economic and political transformation using ordered logit models. Those core socio-demographic and economic variables relevant in the US and West European countries have a similar impact on happiness in Eastern Europe under conditions of dramatic economic, political, and social change. The individual effects of variables across countries are not statistically different from the results obtained from the pooled data set. Cross-country differences in aggregate happiness can be explained well by variations in the unemployment rates, the degree of political freedom and the human development index.     

Ethics and Politics to the Rescue of Neoclassical Economics?

Why is it so difficult to reform the economies of Eastern Europe? Jan Winiecki, of the Institute of Labour Economics in Warsaw, argues that the decline of moral standards under communism means that reform can only be brought about by people untainted by the old regime.     

Women managers in Poland and the United States: a comparative analysis

This paper compares women managers in Poland and the United States in the context of their contrasting political and economic systems—the socialism of Central and Eastern Europe and the liberal democratic tradition of the West. We discuss the two political philosophies and their impact on gender roles and labour markets, and then compare this theory to the reality of Poland's transition. Finally, this background is used to analyse differences between Polish women managers and their American counterparts.     

FREEDOM AND ITS ENEMIES: PROBLEMS OF RE‐ESTABLISHING FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY IN THE EUROPEAN CONTEXT1

The experience of living in non‐free communist societies may have made the people of Eastern Europe particularly sensitive to the weakening and ultimately the loss of freedom. Many see such a process currently taking place in a Europe that increasingly places group rights and entitlements above the rights of individuals. Such a process has been driven by a growing belief in the inevitability of market failure, a desire to use the state for personal gain and a fear of openness, freedom and competition.     

The Expansion of the Private Sector

How important is the recent expansion of the private sector in Eastern Europe? Professor Jan Winiecki of the Institute of Labour Research, Warsaw, in the first of a series of Letters from Eastern Europe, argues that the expansion of private enterprise in socialist economies may not be all that it appears.     

Eastern European Economic Integration and Foreign Direct Investment

Economic transition in Eastern Europe should generate market growth. In addition, current discussions on economic integration and the development of a free-trade area in Eastern Europe will improve market accessibility. These two forces will significantly affect the strategies by which external firms will choose to supply markets in Eastern Europe. This paper examines the ways in which supply strategy is likely to change. We show that both market growth and improved market accessibility will lead the external firms to switch from exporting to foreign direct investment. However, market growth is likely to lead to dispersed investment in the growing economies, whereas increased market accessibility, by establishing an integrated regional bloc in Eastern Europe, is more likely to lead to concentrated investment plus infra-regional exports to the remainder of the regional bloc. The switch from exporting to local production through foreign direct investment will favor consumers through lowered prices but will harm national producers by depressing profit margins.     

The wisdom of demagogues: institutions,corruption and support for authoritarian populists

This article analyses the drivers of support for authoritarian populist parties in Europe. Such parties claim to represent the interests of ordinary people against greedy and out‐of‐touch elites. Simultaneously, they reject conventional constraints on democratic policymaking. In recent years, such parties on the political left and right have been gaining influence in countries across Europe. Using a panel data set from 1980–2016, we use semiparametric Tobit models with country fixed effects to explain support for authoritarian populists. We find that large vote shares of right‐wing – but not left‐wing – authoritarian populists are associated closely to corruption. Other commonly cited explanations such as unemployment, inequality and immigration perform poorly in predicting support for populist political platforms on the political right. While a full theoretical explanation of the link between corruption and right‐wing populism remains beyond the scope of this article, we suggest that the mechanism involves political trust. Corruption weakens trust in political institutions, which populists exploit. Curbing the rise of right‐wing authoritarian populism in Europe will thus require restoring trust in the integrity of politics.     

The rise and fall of social partnership in postsocialist Europe: the Commonwealth of Independent States

Traditional trade unions throughout the postsocialist world embraced ‘social partnership’ as a means to secure their institutional survival in a radically changed economic and political environment. The commitment of national governments to social partnership ebbed and flowed through the 1990s, but it was confirmed, at least rhetorically, in Central and Eastern Europe by the prospect and requirements of accession to the European Union. This article explores the fate of social partnership in the ‘other half’ of Europe, the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, where social dialogue has largely been abandoned and trade unions alternatively marginalised or subordinated to the state apparatus.     

ECONOMIC REFORM IN EASTERN EUROPE

Abstract. Since the early 1960s, reforms in the traditional centralized model of a planned economy have been debated. In most of Eastern Europe, reforms have been confined to cautious ones seeking to improve central planning. But in Hungary, and to a small degree elsewhere, more radical reforms have taken root. These retain elements of planning but also introduce the institutions and policies needed to support a more active market orientation for the economy. Such reforms encounter limits when they begin to threaten, or call into question, established political structures and it is an open question how much further reforms can proceed in Hungary without political change.     

Arm's length funding for civil society

Abstract

Support for the development of civil society became a major aim in the transition economies in Eastern Europe after the political changes of 1989. However, the need for government funding and the aspirations for independence have remained somewhat contradictory until the recent emergence of the ‘arm's length’ methods of supporting civil society organizations. This article reports on recent experiences of using these methods in Hungary.     

Diverging trends in health care use between 2010 and 2016: Evidence from three groups of transition countries

This paper investigates changes in health care use in 28 transition countries using data on more than 60,000 households from the “Life in Transition” surveys II and III conducted in 2010 and 2016. Following the literature, the transition countries are divided into three groups – Eastern Europe, Southern Europe and the non-Baltic states of the former Soviet Union with Mongolia – based on the speed of their transformation. Regressions based on Andersen’s conceptual framework show no difference in public health care use between the three groups in 2010. By 2016, however, the share of households using the public health care system dropped by remarkable 17.1–22.2% points in Southern Europe and 13.5–27.1% points in the former Soviet Union with Mongolia compared to Eastern Europe. Moreover, by 2016, the probability of a household using the private health care system (with no use of public health care) in Southern Europe and the former Soviet Union was 7.5–18.7% points higher than in Eastern Europe, whereas it was 2.9–6.8% points lower than in Eastern Europe back in 2010. The analyses indicate that differences in household characteristics, as well as perceived corruption and quality of public health care, help to understand these diverging trends in health care use in the three groups of transition countries between 2010 and 2016.     

The impact of policy,political and economic uncertainty on corporate capital investment in the emerging markets of Eastern Europe and Turkey

This paper examines the impact of policy, political, and economic uncertainty on firm-level capital investment in Czechia, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and Turkey. Our results indicate an insignificant relationship between uncertainty and investment in these countries. This finding is robust to six different uncertainty measures, including time-series uncertainty indices that track either local or global uncertainty and country-level electoral activities. The results are also robust to two different proxies for measuring corporate investment. Overall, the real-option mechanism in which firms delay irreversible investment in uncertain times does not hold in the emerging markets of Eastern Europe and Turkey.     

思政课教学中的语言艺术

要改善教学效果,教师的教学语言是一把钥匙。语言是一种艺术。教师的教学效果很大程度上取决于他的语言表达能力。文章论述了在思政课教学中如何运用教学语言艺术(包括肢体语言),运用语言魅力增强教育教学效果,达到良好的育人目的。     

Firm performance and the political economy of corporate governance: survey evidence for Bulgaria,Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia

Using survey data for 220 traditional manufacturing firms over 7 years of transition and 4 Central Eastern Europe (CEE) countries, we find firms that produced for the EU market under planning consistently outperform those that produced for the CMEA market. Within the previously CMEA market, the best firms were selected to outside privatisation and outperformed insider/state owned firms. Outside privatisation was resisted in EU oriented firms and ownership was found to have no effect on performance. Path dependent demand shocks and political constraints on the sequencing of state firms to private ownership determine the relationship between firm performance and ownership structure during transition.     

International stock market integration: Central and South Eastern Europe compared

We examine the international stock market comovements between Western Europe vis-à-vis Central (Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland) and South Eastern Europe (Croatia, Macedonia and Serbia) using multivariate GARCH models in the period 2006–2011. Comparing these two groups, we find that the degree of comovements is much higher for Central Europe. The correlation of South Eastern European stock markets with developed markets is essentially zero. An exemption to this regularity is Croatia, with its stock market displaying a greater degree of integration toward Western Europe recently, but still below the levels typical for Central Europe. All stock markets fall strongly at the beginning of the global financial crisis and we do not find that the crisis altered the degree of stock market integration between these groups of countries.     

A Political Economy Approach to the Neoclassical Model of Transition

The neoclassical model of transition from a centrally-administered socialist economic system to a market-based economic system was implemented in Russia and Eastern Europe. The neoclassical process took the form of either shock therapy or gradualism. However, each approach actually involved a combination of shock therapy and gradualist policies, making the distinction between the two approaches unfounded. In addition, both approaches suffered by the innate inadequacies of neoclassical economic analysis as being politically/institutionally naked. Both shock therapy supporters and gradualist neoclassical economists did not provide a specific process of institutional development, favouring a gradual market-driven institutional outcome. With regard to the political structure, democracy was inconsistent with shock therapy, while active state intervention during transition was inconsistent with the ultimate goal of the gradualist neoclassical economists of competitive capitalism.     

Foreign and domestic growth drivers in Eastern Europe

This paper analyses the growth effects of capital formation, exports and FDI as major, drivers of economic development in Eastern Europe. The fundamental innovations are, identified by empirically and theoretically motivated short- and long-run restrictions in, structural cointegrated vector autoregressions. Impulse responses and variance, decompositions reveal quite different growth effects in various Eastern European countries. Generally, a strong reliance on exports goes along with higher GDP, and FDI bears, substantial potential for fostering economic growth. It is shown that the recent worldwide, recession clearly hit Eastern Europe through the export channel, whereas the recovery is, mainly supported by positive demand shocks.     

FULL OF EASTERN PROMISE - UNDERSTANDING HOUSING PRIVATIZATION IN POST-SOCIALIST COUNTRIES

In a period of economic transition, many commentators have identified the inefficiencies, distortions and inequalities which exist in the housing system of post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe. These structural flaws are deemed to be incompatible with the adoption of free market principles and economic liberalization. For economic and political reasons the reform of the housing system has become a necessary and indispensable element of the market reform process. This paper contributes to the growing debate on the context in which housing reform and housing privatization programs have been adopted in Europe's post-socialist economies. The paper goes on to argue that the introduction of housing privatization and the preoccupation with owner-occupation has not been based on any overall assessment of what has occurred elsewhere in western Europe or on the experience of housing provision in other advanced western capitalist countries. The economically driven orthodox approach towards privatization and the way this has been translated into the housing system of post-socialist countries raises important policy questions on the longer term viability of housing provision and the creation of a sustainable housing system.     

Europe: single market or political union?

The choice is between single market and political union over-simplified. Even an effective single market requires some political integration. So too does the management of a single currency, advantageous in itself. Neither requires a 'European economic government.' Beyond this, the peoples of Europe increasingly question the need for further supra-nationalism.'Political union,' in the form which frightens people, will not happen. Britain must play a full part in shaping the EU and its unique institutional structures, and prepare to join the euro-zone as soon as sensibly possible.