The compensation hypothesis goes east: FDI and welfare state demand in postcommunist countries

While existing research provides evidence that globalisation sparks citizen demand for the welfare state in wealthy Western democracies, less is known about how globalisation affects public demand for welfare elsewhere. This study explores the link between globalisation and welfare preferences in postcommunist countries by examining workers at multinational corporations (MNCs). These workers have previously been found to have lower levels of job security, even in Western Europe. Additionally, in the postcommunist context, MNC employment also frequently offers better opportunities than other available jobs. This combination of risk and benefit creates higher demand for social insurance (such as unemployment insurance) because MNC workers have both higher job insecurity and higher costs of job loss (if the benefits of MNC employment make it difficult to find an equally good job). Original survey data from Ukraine shows that MNC workers experience greater insecurity and are paid more than other workers. They also express preferences for more expansive welfare programmes, prioritising those related to labour market insurance. This pattern of MNC workers’ experience and preferences is confirmed in cross-national survey data from 30 peripheral economies, demonstrating that the compensation hypothesis has wider application than previously shown.     

The Political Viability of Carbon Pricing: Policy Design and Framing in British Columbia and California

The adoption of climate policies with visible, substantial costs for households is uncommon because of expected political backlash, but British Columbia's carbon tax and California's cap‐and‐trade program imposed such costs and still survived vigorous opposition. To explain these outcomes, this article tests hypotheses concerning policy design, framing, energy prices, and elections. It conducts universalizing and variation‐finding comparisons across three subcases in the two jurisdictions and uses primary sources to carry out process tracing involving mechanisms of public opinion and elite position‐taking. The article finds strong support for the timing of independent energy price changes, exogenous causes of election results, reducing the visibility of carbon pricing, and using public‐benefit justifications, as well as some support for making concessions to voters. By contrast, the effects of the use of revenue, industry exemptions/compensations, and making polluters pay are not uniform, because the effects of revenue use depend on how it is embedded in coalition building efforts and a middle path between exempting or compensating industry and burdening it appears to be more effective than pursuing just one or the other approach.     

Income inequality and level of corruption in post-communist European countries between 1995 and 2014

This paper analyses the relationships between income inequality and corruption in Europe and looks specifically at post-communist European countries. The scientific community agrees that there is important relationship between income inequality and corruption and many authors believe that low income inequality is connected to low corruption. According to empirical papers, this is true not only on the European scale, but also on a global scale. In this paper, I test this claim by conducting a multilevel analysis on 39 European countries in the period of 1995–2014. This model ascertains that there are immense differences between post-communist countries and the rest of European countries. The effects of income inequality on the level of corruption are discussed.     

Achieving the Promise to Leave No Girl behind in Commonwealth Countries

ABSTRACT

The education Sustainable Development Goal includes a commitment to ensuring that all children – regardless of their gender and circumstances within which they are born – should complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education. The Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in April 2018 re-affirmed the importance of 12 years of quality education for all, particularly marginalised groups including disadvantaged girls. To inform these commitments, this paper aims to situate the current evidence on girls’ education across the 53 countries in the Commonwealth, with a particular focus on low- and lower-middle income countries where the challenges are the greatest. It identifies the current status of access to school and learning, and highlights trends in domestic and aid financing to support the targets. It then presents evidence on interventions aimed at tackling barriers to girls’ access and learning to achieve the commitments. The paper argues a need not only to focus on gender parity in education – i.e. an equal proportion of girls and boys in school and learning – but also to pay greater attention to the more ambitious target of gender equality, which requires an end to discrimination if a truly level playing field is to be achieved.     

论发达国家的国际气候环境保护责任简

依据国际环境法的“共同但有区别的责任”原则,发达国家应当承担应对气候变化的率先的和主要的国际气候环境保护责任.但是,在实践中,由于综合国力等因素的影响,发达国家迟迟不与发展中国家就气候环境保护的核心条款达成协议,甚至推行单边主义和争夺国际环境公共权力,导致发达国家国际气候环境保护责任未能有效实现.制度上的完善设计和广大发展中国家的团结协作,是实现发达国家国际气候环境保护责任的必然选择.     

Inflation targeting at the crossroads: Evidence from post-communist economies during the crisis

The objective of this paper is to assess if inflation targeting post-communist economies performed better, in terms of output growth, during the crisis than their non-inflation targeting counterparts. The paper also puts the issue in the context of the preconditions of inflation targeters to adopt this regime. 26 post-communist economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States are analyzed during the ongoing economic crisis. Results suggest that inflation targeters of those countries performed worse than non-inflation targeters. The growth decline in inflation targeters post-communist economies has been estimated to be deeper by about four percentage points than that in non-inflation targeters. The study finds very limited role of the preconditions for growth decline. Only the lower amount of monetary financing of the budget may have contributed in inflation-targeting countries to have gone through the crisis better.     

Differentiation within reciprocity: the European Union approach to preferential trade agreements

Recent statements on European Union (EU) trade policy towards developing countries (DCs) have stressed the need for differentiation between trading partners depending on their level of development. But what does this mean in practice? This article assesses the substance of EU trade policy towards a number of partners at different levels of development on the basis of the texts of recent preferential trade agreements (PTAs). It argues that EU PTA policy exhibits differentiation within a general shift towards reciprocity vis-à-vis DCs and that this needs to be assessed at the level of specific policy areas as much as partner country. It also suggests that the factors shaping EU policy vary from case to case with commercial competition and sector interests relatively more important in PTAs with emerging markets and high-income DCs and norms and institutional factors relatively more important in shaping those with least developed or low-income DCs.     

Therefore,Is Bureaucracy Dead? Making a Case for Complementarity of Paradigms in Public Administrative Thinking and Discourse

Public Administration has gone through conceptual development to inject renaissance and public value creation. The literature provides a battleground of ideas between bureaucracy, new public management and post NPM with the latter ones chastising bureaucracy. The new developments should be seen as perfecting and correcting some of the extremes of bureaucracy but cannot replace it entirely. Owing to the broad nature of the public sector coupled with complex goals, agencies and mandates; this paper argues for a synergistic relationship and harmonization of the principles espoused by each paradigm; because each may be applicable in specific context, sector and periods.     

Investors,turbulence, and transition: Democratic transition and foreign direct investment in nineteen developing countries

Do profit‐seeking foreign direct investors value a country's transition to democracy? If they do, they should vote with their pocketbooks, resulting in a post‐transition increase in foreign direct investment flows. This study attempts to uncover links between transition to democracy and foreign direct investment (FDI) in Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean, In doing so, it addresses existing arguments about connections between democracy and investor behavior. The regions examined have not only experienced democratic transitions, they also account for the majority of the increasing flow of FDI to the developing world. This research employs time‐series cross‐sectional (TSCS) economic and political data, using ordinary least squares with panel corrected standard errors. The central finding is that transition to democracy has a negative effect on FDI. Secondarily, political instability and higher levels of democracy also deter foreign direct investors.     

Constrained, pragmatic pro-democratic appraising constitutional review courts in post-Soviet politics

This paper conceptualizes the behavior of higher courts in the politics of former Soviet republics and attempts to set up a framework for the study of democratic contributions by post-Soviet constitutional courts. Although political expediency is noted to be the central driving force behind the judges’ decisions in politically sensitive cases, as courts are subject to different constraints from quasi-autocratic executives, it is argued that constitutional review tribunals are generally pro-democratic in their political orientation and that they can become the allies of pro-democratic parties in transitional periods of elite change. To support this proposition, this paper proceeds from a series of theoretical arguments to empirical observation of judicial behavior in times of political uncertainty, the latter being a perfect test for probing the political orientation of the courts.