Cape Verde and the risks of tourism specialisation: the tourism option for Africa’s small states

ABSTRACT

Tourism is a viable, but risky, option for many small island countries to integrate and compete in the world economy. This article examines tourism in the small island economy of Cape Verde. It assesses the risks to its long term development posed by the industry. The country has one of the fastest growing tourism industries in the world. However, this rapid growth is a dual-edge sword. Tourism-led growth results in real economic gains. However, the type and organisation of Cape Verde’s tourism industry magnifies the country’s already high structural vulnerability. Given its current structure and pace of growth, tourism increases macroeconomic risks and vulnerability. It is reproducing the same monoculture dependency that traditionally hampered development in African economies. The policy lessons are clear. Cape Verde must foster economic diversification while simultaneously engaging in strategies to mitigate the risks that accompany its biggest and fastest growing sector and export.     

The Baltic miracle? The economic crisis and its consequences for young people in the labor market of the Baltic states, 2007–2017

ABSTRACT

The financial crisis (2008–2009) resulted in significant deterioration of the youth labor market in the Baltic states. In 2017, however, the Baltic states were among the countries with the highest employment-to-population ratio in Europe (the ‘Baltic Miracle’). This article shows that the observed progress is mostly due to the demographic changes in the three countries. Isolating the demographic effect demonstrated that it played crucial role in mitigating the negative effects of the crisis, especially in Latvia and Lithuania. The results of the study show that in 2017 only in Estonia had the youth labor market returned to its precrisis conditions.     

Co-creating life histories

This paper argues that the 2008 economic crisis was particularly deep in Estonia and Iceland because non-corporatist neo-liberal political features were essential endogenous factors deepening it. A lack of corporatist features also formed the basis for responses to the crisis and the political aftermath in both cases. Furthermore, the paper argues that adding new institutionalist aspects to the corporatist model – in particular the juxtaposition of compound and simple polities – helps deepen our understanding of political dynamics in societies that lack clear-cut corporatist features. It makes a big difference whether or not a country enters the neo-liberal era with an already corporatist set of structures.