Search

Despite the ever growing body of scholarly work on policy developments in the post-communist New Member States of the European Union (NMS), systematic comparisons of policy outcome performance and its determinants are still scarce. This article identifies patterns of post-communist policy outcomes across the fields of economic, social and environmental policy. By employing pooled time-series cross-sectional analysis with a Fixed Effects Vector Decomposition (FEVD) estimator it investigates to what extent policy outcome performance is determined by differing policy efforts (outputs or reform tracks), transitional conditions and international influences. Although citizens are still negatively affected by the initial economic recession, especially in the social domain, policy reforms and efforts are decisive in determining the outcome performance of the NMS relative to one another in the longer run. Successful and comprehensive market reforms and steering capabilities prove to be particularly important in this regard. Furthermore, internationalisation has an important, albeit ambiguous, impact. While exposure to the world market is reflected in negative policy performance, interaction with and financial commitment from Western European Union countries promote positive policy outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extensive decentralization and devolution efforts among industrialized nations throughout the 1980s and 1990s call for a closer look at the effect these trends have on public policy. This article investigates the impact of these trends on the environmental performance of industrialized countries. There are two competing hypotheses as to how federalism and other multilevel governance structures affect the environmental performance of countries. The first stresses that the resulting institutional fragmentation and regulatory unpredictability is detrimental to the protection of the environment. An alternative hypothesis emphasizes that multilevel systems fare better regarding environmental performance because they can effectively respond to local needs and encourage innovation at the sub-national level. Based on OECD air pollution data, the study finds that multilevel structures affect the way in which important determinants of environmental performance work. Thus, corporatist accommodation structures, which are known to enhance environmental policy, do so primarily in multi-tiered systems. A high level of economic development, on the other hand, which has also been shown to contribute to environmental performance, does so mainly in countries that are characterized by weak multilevel structures. The article discusses theoretical and practical implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]