Analysis of Child Marriage and Related Policies in Indonesia: Sustainable Development Issue

Child marriage is a prevalent social problem in developing countries, including Indonesia, and its implementation has been prohibited in all regions of Indonesia. The revision of the marriage law that lifts up the minimum age limit for child marriage and the implementation of the child protection policy does not inevitably guarantee that the practice of child marriage can be avoided. The research objective of this study was to analyze the success of the factors and the effectiveness of the implementation of policies on handling the practice of child marriage in achieving sustainable goals in Indonesia. Data collection was performed using a profile approach utilizing data from the National Development Planning Agency of 2016-2019, desk review of the literature, and stock-taking of relevant research studies. Moreover, the effectiveness of policy implementation is assessed using a contingency analysis of the factors of policy commitment and government capacity. The results showed that the effectiveness of policy implementation from the factor of policy commitment was performed through the integration of the goals of SDGs into the national strategy for preventing child marriage, enforcement of main policy changes, mapping of regional-based issue trends and root causes, mapping of regional-level derivative policies issued before main policy revision changes, harmonization and synchronization of various policies through derivative policies, planning and development at the regional and village levels. Adjustment in the factor of implementation capacity of policy is indicated by institutional convergence and synergy of various parties, including learning from various good practices in the regions. The contingency matrix-based policy application model for handling the practice of child marriage will be effective if it utilizes a progressive model.

Institutional Convergence of Bulgaria to the Eurozone Countries

Institutions are one of the main factors for the economic growth and development of any economy. And insofar as development is defined as a set of economic and institutional factors, the reduction of differences in the development of individual countries and regions naturally leads us to the institutional convergence, which is the object of study. When researching the convergence of Bulgaria to the EU countries and more closely to the Eurozone, many questions arise about whether there is institutional convergence and how it can be revealed. This is the subject of analysis presented in the study. The thesis presented here is that it is possible to consider institutional convergence for Bulgaria with the countries of the Euro zone, represented by qualitative and quantitative indicators, which, however, is unstable. The methodology is based on the understanding of institutional convergence as the converging of economic and political institutions, and given the fact that they are different for each of the economies; a comparative analysis is used to study the convergence as a whole. For this purpose, the analysis of institutional quality and comparative analysis uses the main indicators of the World Bank – Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) and Ease of Doing Business Indicator. The results of the pre-selected criteria give grounds to find those of the observed indicators, which reveal improvement and respectively converging in the direction of institutional convergence of Bulgaria with the countries from the EU area.

Governance Trends among New EU Member States: Is There Institutional Convergence?

The main objective of this paper is to explore the institutional convergence of Central and Eastern European Union member countries as a possible consequence of both the transfer of selected Western formal institutions to those countries and the adoption of acquis communautaire. This issue dates back to the beginning of the 1990s when the predominant expectation was that the successful formal institutions in Western countries would yield the same results in transition countries. In the meantime, mainly because of informal constraints, this has shown to be a misconception in most cases. The methodology used in the paper is twofold. First, by means of descriptive statistics, and using the varieties of capitalism approach, we show that, when analysing institutional quality using the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), there are two divergent groups of EU countries. The first group consists of Liberal, Nordic, and Continental countries, and the second consists of Mediterranean and CEE member states that are further divided into liberal and coordinated market economies. Second, based on the calculation of the σ- and unconditional β-convergence of governance trends in the period 1996–2019, we empirically confirm that there are also variations within the CEE countries as well as within the specific dimensions of governance.

Chinese Institutions and Policy Experimentation: The case of Zhongguancun

<p>The nature of institutional change lies at the heart of understanding China’s extraordinary transformation of the past 30 years. This thesis adopts an historical institutionalist approach, emphasising dynamic and path dependent processes, in examining Zhongguancun (ZGC), China’s premier science, technology and innovation zone in Beijing. The analytical framework deals with many of the critical issues of institutional analysis of large-scale economic development and social change: the Chinese experience as radical or gradual change; institutional convergence or divergence; formal and informal institutions; top-down design and bottom-up, spontaneous development. ZGC illustrates the ongoing importance of experimentation in Chinese policy as various institutional innovations have emerged from the zone, both spontaneously and through state-led trial schemes. However, increasing preponderance from the Chinese leadership and the highest state-level institutions may ultimately thwart attempts to turn ZGC into a world-class innovation hub.</p>

Chinese Institutions and Policy Experimentation: The case of Zhongguancun

<p>The nature of institutional change lies at the heart of understanding China’s extraordinary transformation of the past 30 years. This thesis adopts an historical institutionalist approach, emphasising dynamic and path dependent processes, in examining Zhongguancun (ZGC), China’s premier science, technology and innovation zone in Beijing. The analytical framework deals with many of the critical issues of institutional analysis of large-scale economic development and social change: the Chinese experience as radical or gradual change; institutional convergence or divergence; formal and informal institutions; top-down design and bottom-up, spontaneous development. ZGC illustrates the ongoing importance of experimentation in Chinese policy as various institutional innovations have emerged from the zone, both spontaneously and through state-led trial schemes. However, increasing preponderance from the Chinese leadership and the highest state-level institutions may ultimately thwart attempts to turn ZGC into a world-class innovation hub.</p>

Diffusion and Decentralized Bargaining in International Organizations: Evidence from Mercosur's Dispute Settlement Mechanism

How and with what effects do institutions diffuse between international organizations (IOs)? An emerging literature extends a key insight of the study of diffusion processes among states to the international level, establishing that the adoption of institutions in IOs is regularly conditioned by the choices of other IOs. Yet, this literature neglects a key contextual difference between the two settings: unlike in the hierarchically structured organizations that have dominated the literature on diffusion, institutional creation, and change in IOs are the result of decentralized bargaining among sovereign governments. This paper develops a heuristic model that shows how diffusion between IOs shapes decision-making within them through its impact on the institutional preferences of individual governments. The model establishes that, unlike in diffusion processes among states, convergence is an unlikely outcome of diffusion between IOs. By implication, studies that take institutional convergence as their starting point are likely to underestimate the pervasiveness of diffusion effects. I demonstrate these arguments with a case study of the establishment of a regional dispute settlement system in Mercosur, a regional organization in Latin America.

The East–West Divide Revisited 30 Years On

Thirty years after the end of the Cold War and the division of the continent, are we witnessing a renewed east–west divide in Europe? Fifteen years following the enlargement of the European Union to countries of central and eastern Europe, are we witnessing mere political differences or is there an emerging divergence between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ EU member states on issues as fundamental as democracy and the rule of law? The triggering of Article 7 of the Lisbon Treaty against Poland and Hungary suggests the latter. This is the interpretation favoured in the media or in declarations of political figures on both sides of a newly restored dividing line. In the west, it tends to be perceived as a challenge to the European project and sometimes even as a justification for reservations regarding the very idea of the EU’s eastward expansion. In the Visegrád Group, there are claims of being treated as second-class members of the EU and resentment of alleged double standards and interference from Brussels, sometimes compared to pre-1989 control from Moscow. How can this triple divide on democracy, migration, and societal issues—three aspects of European liberalism—be accounted for after a quarter-century of unprecedented economic, political, and institutional convergence? One place to start is the misunderstandings concerning the process and meaning given to the post-1989 EU integration process (‘enlargement to the east’ or ‘European unification’). Different security concerns and threat perceptions (east versus south) also remain an obstacle in shaping a Common Foreign and Security Policy. There are deeper historical and cultural differences, the understanding of which is important to avoid recent divisions becoming fault lines. Finally these trends should be understood not as irreconcilable differences, but as a specific and acute version of a transeuropean crisis of democracy.

Divergence Tendencies in the European Integration Process: A Danger for the Sustainability of the E(M)U?

The European integration process started with the aim of reducing the differences in income and/or living standards between the participating countries over time. To achieve this, a certain alignment of institutions and structures was seen as a necessary precondition. While the goal of this income and institutional convergence was successfully achieved over a long period of time, this convergence development has weakened or even turned into divergence in the last one to two decades. This paper provides an overview of the empirical evidence for these convergence and divergence developments and develops policy implications (the challenges and possible ways out).

Economic Growth, Income Distribution, and Social Exclusion in Turkey

This chapter examines the degree of income and institutional convergence between Turkey and European Union (EU) as well as trends in inequality and poverty by taking a long-term perspective as changes in polices an institutions impact on economic and social outcomes, often with considerable lags. The authors’ findings reveal that Turkey has successfully transformed its inward-looking and largely agricultural economy in the past 35 years into an export-oriented and urban-based economy. The transformation has been achieved mostly in periods of dramatic reform embedded in business and political cycles. Nevertheless, in the most recent era, there have been significant setbacks for certain groups in terms of regulatory environment, equality of opportunity, and access to markets and resources. Although there has been progress in the overall distribution of income and other aspects of social inclusion, convergence to EU standards is not easy to observe in these indicators.