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Comments on the papers `Public Administration Education in Democratizing Societies,' by Leslie C. Eliason and `Democracy and Public Management Cases,' by Howard Husock published in the January 1995 issue of the periodical `Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.' Focus on the role of case-based management in education in former Soviet republics.

The paper explains new methodology that was used in the 2005 International Comparison Program (ICP) that compared the relative price levels and GDP levels across 146 countries. In this round of the ICP, the world was divided into six regions: OECD, CIS, Africa, South America, Asia Pacific, and West Asia. What is new in this round compared to previous rounds of the ICP is that each region was allowed to develop its own product list and collect prices on this list for countries in the region. The regions were then linked using another separate product list; 18 countries across the six regions collected prices for products on this list and this information was used to link prices and quantities across the regions. An additional complication was that the final linking of prices and volumes across regions had to respect the regional price and volume measures that were (separately) constructed by the regions. The paper also studies the properties of the Iklé–Dikhanov–Balk multilateral system of index numbers which was used by Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: This study examines the legacy of experiencing armed conflict in childhood and adolescence on women's later risk of intimate partner violence (IPV) in four ex‐Soviet countries. Background: Prior research is largely concerned with male soldiers and perpetration, and rarely considers when, during the life course, conflict occurs. This study focuses on civilians, women's victimization and pays attention to the age at conflict exposure. This aspect is crucial to understand if war has lasting consequences for family violence, beyond contemporaneous effects. This paper further contributes by providing insights on driving mechanisms. Method: The study combines cross‐national data on IPV from the Demographic and Health Surveys (N = 17,787) and geo‐referenced conflict information from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. Using linear models with fixed effects, it compares the IPV outcomes of women exposed to conflict before the end of their teens with nonexposed peers and older women. Results: Young‐age conflict exposure is associated with greater adult IPV risk. Childhood exposure (ages 0–10) matters the most, especially for physical forms of IPV. Results are not driven by migration. Analyses of potential pathways show no relationship between war and changing marriage market conditions, or attitudes towards IPV in women. Conversely, men experiencing conflict in late adolescence (16–19) are more likely to condone violence against partners. Furthermore, women's childhood exposure to conflict correlates with having a violent father. Conclusion: War in young‐ages has long‐term implications for family violence. These appear in part related to greater exposure to family violence, and to a normalization of the use of violence in future potential perpetrators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Achieving price stability has been a serious challenge for CIS countries. In the first half of the 1990s, they experienced very high inflation or hyperinflation, which had originated in the perestroika period and following the dissolution of the ruble area. After the introduction of new currencies and stabilization programs in the mid-1990s, inflation moderated to two-digit levels. However, for lack of sufficient fiscal policy support, this partial progress did not succeed in preventing the financial crisis of 1998/99. The economic boom of the 2000s allowed for a return to macroeconomic stability with stronger fiscal fundamentals, but nevertheless proved insufficient to withstand the shock from the global financial crisis of 2008/09. The paper analyses the evolution monetary policy regimes of in the CIS countries over the decade of the 2000s and early 2010s and is based on the publicly available cross-country statistics and other information provided by the IMF. The paper compares financial openness in these economies both de jure and de facto. These findings will be tested against the empirical data on exchange rate movements and changes in central banks' international reserves. The paper concludes with a discussion on practical choices which CIS countries have in respect of their future monetary policy regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ongoing economic crisis has shifted much of the policy debate to problems of financial sector regulation, productive capacity collapse, among others. However, this leaves unattended the real situation with labour migration, which directly impacts social and economic inner components of being of millions of individual families across the world. The somewhat ad hoc nature of the process poses several policy issues for the home and host economies alike. Immediate concerns relate to streamlining migrants and remittances flows. This involves sensitive aspects of inequality in migrant workers' labour efforts vis-à-vis domestic workers; migrants' social and legal status; and less obvious, but still profound, unproductive misallocation of labour resources. Derived from this premise and recognizing the need for an institutional approach, this paper offers alternative policy solutions to temporary labour migration regulation. This research's original propositions include a Diaspora Regulatory Mechanism and a Migration Development Bank, both operating within a state-managed temporary labour migration regime. Fiscal action, including multilateral agreements, is crucial. The functionality of these mechanisms will directly impact infrastructure, human capital and entrepreneurial projects development in both home and host economies. Discussion is inspired by the analysis of actual circumstances in the economies of the Commonwealth of Independent States, where migration is a social, economic, and increasingly political issue. In the interlinked world, diasporas become dominant actors across all society strata. The development plateau of the post-socialist states offers a rich economic and social soil to conduct responsible policy with future outlook. Moreover, conditions of ongoing economic crisis offer a unique opportunity for daring research to propose and for a motivated decisionmaker to implement original, proactive, and beneficial policy solutions aimed at streamlining the (temporary) labour migration process. This paper contributes to the emerging literature on topics of diaspora, labour migration, and remittance flows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The paper aims to examine the role played by international shell companies in Latvian-type correspondent banking, who creates the shell companies according to what criteria and the resulting money laundering operations for financial flows from Russia and the former Soviet Union. Design/methodology/approach – This paper draws on journalist and non-governmental organisations investigations, financial intelligence unit reports, interviews with participants, whistleblower reports and public domain databases to research financial activities shrouded in secrecy with connections to corruption and organised crime. Findings – Latvian-type correspondent banking generates for its clients from the former Soviet Union anonymous shell companies en masse across diverse onshore and offshore jurisdictions. The shell companies are vehicles for moving white, grey and black funds from Russia, Ukraine and other former Soviet countries through international correspondent banking relations to offshore savings accounts and business suppliers. The creation and administration of the shell companies is handled by para-bank “business introducer” structures that dilute customer documentation. Research limitations/implications – This paper does not address the specifics of Latvia’s domestic anti-money laundering (AML) legislation and enforcement thereof. Practical implications – Attempts to eradicate shell companies in individual jurisdictions, for instance, by introducing registers of beneficial ownership of companies, may merely displace the phenomenon to other jurisdictions, and thus treat the symptom not the disease. Originality/value – This is the first scholarly study of mass use of international shell companies by Latvian-type banking in connection with financial flows from Russia, Ukraine and the former Soviet Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper looks at how Russian policies towards the Black Sea countries have affected its relations with the European Union (EU), departing from Russian foreign policy and how its goals are projected in this area. The analysis seeks to shed light on how Russian political dealings conflate or clash with EU policies developed towards this space. Is the Black Sea area a space for convergence or instead is it promoting dissension in this bilateral relationship? Does Russia understand the EU as a ‘game changer’ in the area? To what extent does the involvement of other external players, such as the USA, with their different policy goals, affect political relations in this complex geography that is the Black Sea area? The paper argues that Russia has promoted a policy towards the Black Sea in line with its main foreign policy goals, and that regarding the EU, it has been following and (re)acting to EU policies and actions in diverse ways, though the Russian rhetoric towards the EU has been harsher than its political moves, due to an understanding of the EU as being a limited player in the area. Therefore, Russia does not perceive the EU as a potential ‘game changer’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nation branding, as a phenomenon, is attracting increasing scholarly attention. However, much of the existing literature has been written by those involved in the public relations industry themselves. There have been some studies which have been written from a critical viewpoint; however, the tensions of branding a nation have often been neglected. This paper aims to explore the inherent tensions between nation branding and nation building. To what extent is nation branding a tool or a practice? What images of the nation do branders seek to promote, and who is this image for? Is nation branding merely a more palatable version of nationalism? In particular this paper focuses on the debates surrounding the launch of Brand Estonia in 2001/2. Brand Estonia, with the slogan Welcome to Estonia: Positively Transforming, was launched to coincide with Estonia staging the Eurovision Song Contest in 2002. It is a unique and interesting case study given the level of controversy that the initiative generated amongst the Estonian public. Estonia was the first Former Soviet Republic to launch a nation branding project and, perhaps more controversially, it was managed by a British-based company, Interbrand. However, little scholarly attention has been paid to public-level discourses concerning Brand Estonia. The empirical findings discussed in this article highlight some of the more salient narratives on national identity that Brand Estonia engendered and therefore aims to fill this gap. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to investigate the role of the international environment in the democratic transition process in the post-Soviet South Caucasus states. Based on the famous theoretical model of linkage and leverage, the influence of two main regional actors, Russia and the West (In this paper, ‘the West’ is conceptualized as the sum of influences stemming from the EU, the US and the multinational institutions dominated by the Western states (e.g. NATO, the IMF, the World Bank, and EBRD).), are explained and conceptualized. The paper argues that competitive authoritarianism, the form of political regime that is believed to be predominant in the region, is the result of the flawed democratization strategy pursued by the EU and the US on the one hand and the influence of Russia, the counter-hegemonic power, on the other hand, which explicitly or implicitly decreases the transformative power of the West. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

References used for an assessment of the monetary policy regimes in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) economies and their ability to provide price and financial stability in the 2000-2010 period are presented.

This paper examines the observed impact of past economic downturns on human development indicators in 29 countries of the region. We estimate empirical elasticities of key human development indicators covering demographics, crime, epidemiology, unemployment, and poverty with respect to changes in per-capita purchase power parity (PPP) gross domestic product. Based on published gross domestic product growth projections from the IMF, we then project the likely impact on the human development indicators in coming years for the countries in the region. The results suggest that the adverse impact of past downturn in income on poverty, public health, mortality, and suicide and homicide rates is likely to be considerable, long-lasting, and to affect the poorest disproportionately. Based on our results, we argue that policy-makers will need better and more timely data to provide the evidence base for policies; and that those policies need to take into account the looming substantial backslide in human development indicators stemming from the global economic crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of the organization ASN, originally called the Association for the Study of Nationalities: USSR and Eastern Europe. Topics include the group's affiliation with the organization American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS), the association of the journal "Nationalities Papers" with the City College of New York (CCNY), and the failure of the periodical "Journal of Soviet Nationalities." Also noted are the ASN's reaction to the end of the Soviet Union, the Soviet annexation of the Baltic States, and speeches in New York City by leaders of former Soviet Republics.

This paper develops a conceptual framework for interpreting the process of urban change in post-communist cities. The departure from the legacies of the communist past has been effected through multiple transformation dynamics of institutional, social and urban change. While institutional reforms have been largely accomplished, the adjustment of urban land use patterns to new societal conditions is still ongoing. Hence, post-communist cities are still cities in transition. Using this interpretative framework and referring to a wide spectrum of academic work, the paper provides an overview of urban restructuring in post-communist countries over the past two decades with a specific focus on the examples of mutual integration of the three fields of transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Albanian case represents the most dramatic instance of post-communist migration: about one million Albanians, a quarter of the country's total population, are now living abroad, most of them in Greece and Italy, with the UK becoming increasingly popular since the late 1990s. This paper draws on three research projects based on fieldwork in Italy, Greece, the UK and Albania. These projects have involved in-depth interviews with Albanian migrants in several cities, as well as with migrant-sending households in different parts of Albania. In this paper we draw out those findings which shed light on the intersections of gender and generations in three aspects of the migration process: the emigration itself, the sending and receiving of remittances, and the care of family members (mainly the migrants' elderly parents) who remain in Albania. Theoretically, we draw on the notion of ‘gendered geographies of power’ and on how spatial change and separation through migration reshapes gender and generational relations. We find that, at all stages of the migration, Albanian migrants are faced with conflicting and confusing models of gender, behavioural and generational norms, as well as unresolved questions about their legal status and the likely economic, social and political developments in Albania, which make their future life plans uncertain. Legal barriers often prevent migrants and their families from enjoying the kinds of transnational family lives they would like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the initial output decline in transition economies by estimating a cross-sectional model stressing two major factors: conflicts and the legacies of the Soviet period. We link the Soviet legacies in place at the outset of transition to the subsequent path for the development of market-related institutions. Institutional development, as proxied by measures of corruption, is used as an intermediate variable. An instrumental variable approach is followed to derive estimates that are not biased by the possible endogeneity of corruption with respect to output developments. Assuming that the extent of Soviet legacies was positively correlated with the length of communist rule allows us to use years under the Soviet regime as an instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at ways in which notions of membership and of just allocation were articulated in the everyday practices of a voluntary organization set up in the early 1990s to distribute clothing and household goods to newcomers from the (former) Soviet Union in Israel. Based on an ethnographic account of the distribution centre, this paper describes its underpinning ideology and demonstrates the implications of this ideology for the rules governing the allocation of goods. The paper analyzes three inter-related axes around which notions of rules of just allocation were equivocally interpreted and implemented. The first of these axes related to the discourse of justice deemed most appropriate to the newcomers; the second to the status of the newcomers; and the third to the creation of social categories—primarily defined in ethnic terms—and the hierarchical relationships between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces the articles published in the September 2005 issue of the periodical "Nationalities Papers". Periodical's focus on the formation of national identities among the citizens of post-Soviet countries; Cultural differences among the people of former Soviet Republics highlighted in the issue.

In reporting on recent research on the changing geographies of everyday life in the town of Nowa Huta in southern Poland, this paper seeks to promote the use of post-socialism as a conceptual, rather than simply descriptive and/or transitory, category. By exploring experiences of (im)mobility and (in)security in post-socialism, this paper connects to related work on the West and asks what difference post-socialism makes. It concludes by presenting a post-socialism marked out as different by the particular experiences of socialism, its construction and destruction and as a partial and hybrid social form, produced by a combination of multiple social forms constructed at varied scales of time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the breakup of the Soviet Union and the advent of globalization, an international buccaneer capitalism has developed. Criminal enterprises that were previously intra-border have expanded across borders and provided for the willing buyers services and products not legally obtainable. This paper explains how buccaneer capitalism (the development of criminal enterprises conducted in emerging markets into legitimate businesses) has evolved. Examples of American buccaneer capitalism are presented as is a chart showing the Historiography of Russian/Soviet Crime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conclusively, in 1992, the Soviet Union broke up and its 15 Republics gained independence. After the initial, difficult transition from planned to market economy, the Republics have shown different development paths. This paper analyses their degree of economic development. Following the growing interest in new and better measures of development, we elaborate an index of development, the Ex-Soviet Development Index (ESDI), based on a set of variables from the World Development Indicators database released by the World Bank. To do this, we select the variables through principal component analysis and calculate the ESDI using factorial analysis. Therefore, to test the well-supported hypothesis that good governance has a key positive impact on development, we compare the ESDI with a proposed index of governance, the Ex-Soviet Governance Index (ESGI), elaborating data from the Worldwide Governance Indicators database of the World Bank. The correlation between ESDI and ESGI is shown being high as expected, and this allow us thinking that, in order to classify countries in classes, a cluster analysis with the two indices makes sense. The correlation between ESDI and GDP growth is almost zero. This confirms that the concept of socio-economic performance and development expressed by ESDI cannot be reduced to the growth rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to a discussion paper on the monetary policy regimes in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) economies and their ability to provide price and financial stability in the 2000-2010 period is presented.

An introduction is presented that addresses the issue theme of political and social change in the South Caucasus, noting issue articles on topics such as democratization, religion and politics, and civil society in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia.

Most studies of the post-Soviet space often explicitly or implicitly analyze Russia not as a new independent state but as the political successor of the USSR, thereby almost automatically leading to conclusions about Russian neo-imperialism. This paper explains how distorted discourses on the Soviet legacy originated and how they obstruct equal relations between Russia and other former Soviet republics using the example of the Baltic states. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines for the first time the consequences of ill health on labour supply for a sample of nine countries from the former Soviet Union (FSU), using a unique multicountry household survey specifically designed for this region. We control for a wide range of individual, household, and community factors, using both standard regression techniques and instrumental variable estimation to address potential endogeneity. Specifically, we find in our baseline ordinary least squares specification that poor health is associated with a decrease in the probability of working of about 13 %. Controlling for community-level unobserved variables slightly increases the magnitude of this effect, to about 14 %. Controlling for endogeneity with the instrumental variable approach further supports this finding, with the magnitude of the effect ranging from 12 to 35 %. Taken together, our findings confirm the cost that the still considerable adult health burden in the FSU is imposing on its population, not only in terms of the disease burden itself, but also in terms of individuals' labour market participation, as well as potentially in terms of increased poverty risk. Other things being equal, this would increase the expected 'return on investment' to be had from interventions aimed at improving health in this region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts Charles Tilly's political process model of democratization. We focus on one aspect of that model: coalitions. We draw on publicly available archival data from turnout figures, contentious politics and party politics in the former Soviet Union (FSU) to map out coalitions that move those polities toward and away from democracy. This cartographic approach to charting trajectories reveals greater variation than the democracy-dictatorship dichotomy and its variations ("hybrid regimes"). One conclusion we draw from mapping changes in coalitions is that the contraction of the polity in some FSU countries is a response to the growth of factionalized parties and personalized tyrannies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As in human relations, attraction can be an influential force in international relations. A well-known tool in Western countries, in Russia ‘soft power’ has come into play mainly under Putin’s presidency in the 2000s. This paper focuses on language and education as sources generating ‘soft power’. It looks first on the institutional framework progressively established to attract and integrate culturally the former Soviet space. Second, it studies the evolution of the Russian language and education in Armenia. The findings suggest that even if the previous decline in the usage of Russian has been reversed, the monopoly once enjoyed by this language seems to be over. Russian is promoted in a multicultural environment – alongside English, French, German or Chinese – which reflects the new geopolitical reality. Multicultural landscape characterises also the Armenian higher education system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including momentum profits of investment in China, causes of Commonwealth of Independent States exchange rate movements, and the evolution of investment funds in Turkey.

In the 1970s, when intellectual debate in the rest of the world was preoccupied with the problem of an imbalanced, one-way information flow between Western industrialized countries and less-developed countries in South and East, people in the Soviet Union faced another problem — a problem of deficit of information from the West, which was a result of purposeful politics of the Soviet state. In 1989 the Iron Curtain fell, but it does not mean that nowadays there are no bounds and boundaries in the flow of information to and from the Former Soviet Republics. This paper deals with the issue of foreign news in contemporary Ukraine and explores constraints in making international news in the media. It analyses a set of determinants of international news production in the Ukrainian media and the way they influence the scope and quality of foreign news coverage. The re- search is based on interviews with about thirty media experts and news producers at major Ukrainian broadcasting organizations, as well as from print and online media. The interviewees — editors-in-chief, heads of international news' departments, foreign correspondents — were asked about the process of international news production in their editorial offices, the human and technical resources allocated for foreign news coverage, the professional standards of international journalism, as well as the main sources of foreign news and criteria of their selection involved in the news making process. Results of the study show that international news making in Ukraine is influenced by peculiar factors rooted in the Soviet past, such as journalists' inclination to one-sided reporting and poor command of foreign languages (except Russian), and by common factors determining tendencies in foreign news coverage worldwide, such as the pressure of the market which induces cost-cutting in media organizations and tabloidization of media content. An important finding of the study is the conclusion about indirect, or circuitous movement of foreign news from international news agencies to the Ukrainian media. Because of the peculiarities of Ukrainian news production described in the paper, news from Reuters or Associated Press regularly reaches Ukrainian editorial offices after it has been processed by Russian newsmakers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Challenging the main reports of corruption in Ukraine, this article proposes that most of the 'economic transactions' that are reported as bribe taking have a deeper meaning and can be analysed within the framework of gift exchange proposed by Marcel Mauss. This paper thus focuses on the three alleged most 'corrupted' places in Ukraine: a university, a hospital and a police control post, in order to develop a detailed analysis of the meanings behind these transactions. Furthermore, it examines the particular role that social actors take within these arrangements. Finally, I propose the recognition of a grey zone between corruptions as evident in the ethnographic examples analysed in the course of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the importance of financial and other obstacles to innovation in the Netherlands using statistical information from the CIS 3.5 innovation survey. We report results on the effect of these obstacles on the firms’ decision to abandon, prematurely stop, seriously slow down, or not to start an innovative project. These results are compared with those from other studies in the Netherlands and other countries. We end with a discussion of policy measures that have been taken to overcome, or at least attenuate these obstacles, such as R&D tax incentives, venture capital financing and policy mix packages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The period between March 1990 and June 1993 represents the critical window for European Union (EU)-Baltic relations. During this time Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania laid the foundation for future EU membership. For its part, the European community made a commitment to include the three republics in the process of enlargement. This paper traces the beginnings of EU-Baltic cooperation and examines factors that led to growing political and economic convergence. Nordic membership in the EU, ex-Soviet troop withdrawal, and Russian parliamentary elections were instrumental in bring-ing both sides together on the road to enlargement, but collective guilt provided the underlying rationale. In this paper, the author argues that it is impossible to understand fully this process of convergence without taking into account the connotations and consequences of the "black trinity": the Munich pact, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and the Yalta agreement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UNECE Statistical Division has been conducting questionnaire surveys and collecting information on statistical business registers in the region on a regular basis since 1995. The paper describes the results of the last two questionnaire surveys (2004 and 2006) carried out among the CIS countries, focusing on the observed changes in the sources, the coverage of statistical units, the included variables, and in the usage of statistical business registers. The comparison of these countries' practices reveals important disparities in the status of the business register and its use for economic statistics. On the other hand, it demonstrates some convergence in approaches to statistical business register and attempts to follow more closely the advanced practice of European Union and North American countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]