Privatizations Spark Socialist Backlash: Evidence from East Germany’s Transformation

The fall of the Berlin Wall marks one of the largest transformations of the 20th century. At its core, the year 1990 brought two new systems to Eastern Europe: capitalism and democracy. Yet, to this day, Eastern Europeans show distinctly negative attitudes toward the Western world order, and democratic and market institutions across the region are far from perfect. What explains this unsuccessful transformation? This paper points to the rushed privatization of East European economies as one plausible driver of citizens’ discontent with capitalism and democracy. Using micro-level data from East Germany, we show that firm privatizations led to a marked resurgence of the successor of the former Socialist Unity Party as early as 1994. We argue that this effect is likely due to perceived injustice: Socialist voting thrived whenever firms were sold to Western elites, which local residents took as a sign that capitalism is not meritocratic.

Europejski Zielony Ład i odbudowa polskiej gospodarki – szanse i wyzwania

Man-made climate change has become the greatest political and economic challenge today. The dictate of GDP as the main measure of prosperity and economic success has led to the wasteful use of natural resources and a drastic increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The consequences are more and more felt: water, food and air pollution, the spread of infectious diseases such as Covid19, or extreme weather phenomena caused by global warming. Limiting these phenomena requires strong and consistent political decisions as well as real actions. The ambitious goals of decarbonisation and climate neutrality adopted by the European Union meet with the strongest resistance and criticism in the former Eastern Bloc countries, whose economies are highly dependent on coal. European policymakers are trying to reconcile the interests of European economies, highly diversified both in terms of the economic structure and the share of fossil fuels in the energy mix. The main tool is to be the unprecedented scale of the European budget earmarked for pro-climate actions, which is to help achieve climate neutrality while maintaining economic growth.

Long-term Resilient Labour Strategies to Deal with the Economic Crisis in Europe Using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)

The crisis has had a negative impact on both European economies and labour markets with different effects among countries, raising the importance of analysing the labour market resilience. This paper seeks to identify which strategies and labour adjustments have led European labour markets to both resilient and non-resilient results by using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). The findings show two different configurations explaining 57% of the resilient cases and four configurations explaining 74% of the non-resilient cases. The results of this study revealed three important issues. First of all, the same strategy was found to have different results on labour markets. This fact stressed that the context in which different measures are imposed is a decisive factor in their success. Secondly, resilient strategies underlined the importance of “flexibility”, by increasing temporary employment together with other conditions to escape from the crisis. Finally, the non-resilient results stress the importance of the imbalance between the flexicurity dimensions and the effect of the fall in economic activity on not being resilient in the long-term.

The Relationship between Energy Production and GDP: Evidence from Selected European Economies

The aim of this article was to investigate the possible relationship between energy production and GDP growth. This problem is of a crucial importance because as a numerous studies show, it is difficult to give an unambiguous answer to the question of whether there is a relationship between GDP and energy production and what direction it takes if it exists, i.e., whether energy production drives GDP growth or GDP growth drives energy production. The research conducted by the authors used data on hourly power production in MWh/h averaged over a whole day, which were converted into total quarterly production. The data were divided in terms of the type of energy into conventional, renewable, other and total. Next, the correlation coefficient was calculated for proper data sets in order to determine whether there was a correlation between the variables. The main conclusion from the study is the fact that a correlation measured with the Pearson correlation coefficient is not reflected in the data. Changes in power production independent of the source of power do not influence the GDP directly. Naturally, in some countries, the connection between power production and GDP was stronger; however, comparing this to the rest of the researched countries, where correlation was low or even extremely low, it can be seen that the relationship is random. This study should be seen as an introductory one with a perspective of broadening research in terms of causality between variables, which, nowadays, has great application in terms of climate change and sustainable development.

How Selected Macroeconomic Factors Affect the Corporate Profitability of Transportation and Storage Companies in Selected European Economies

The goal of most companies is to make a certain amount of profit, to which all-important business decisions are a subject. The importance of this goal is evidenced by the fact that profitability indicators belong to the key indicators of business success. Unfortunately, profitability is affected by many often-unpredictable factors, which usually come from the external environment of the company. In this research, these factors are represented by GDP growth rate, inflation rate, reference interest rate, unemployment rate, gross fixed capital formation and the exchange rate against the euro. The aim of the research is to find out whether selected factors influence the company’s profitability or not. Companies of the transportation and storage industry coming from eight selected economies of Central and Eastern Europe are the subject of the analysis. The industry will be analysed at the level of fifteen sub-industries using the Generalized Method of Moment. The data cover the period 2010–2018 and provide information on approximately 25,000 companies. The size of the sample does not allow the results to be summarized in one sentence, but they showed that companies in the selected industry are for the most part negatively affected by the reference interest rate of the economy.

Tourism and Road Transport Emissions in Italy

Tourism is of great importance to European economies, but environmental degradation could reduce the attractiveness of many European destinations considerably. This is even more evident if the future of tourism is depicted in the UN’s Agenda 2030 for Sustainable Development. However, official statistics on the environmental impact of tourism provide only partial information, and almost always with an “accounting scheme” approach, such as occasional and experimental experiences on integrated economic and environmental accounts of tourism. It is necessary to enrich the activity of monitoring and measuring the impact of tourism on the environment and implement policies aimed at increasing the sustainability of the sector. This work intends to contribute to extending information about the theme, providing a new approach based on the integration of official data to study the relationship between tourism and the environment. In detail, the objective of the work is to estimate the level of emissions—in terms of the primary air pollutants—produced by tourists travelling in Italy by road transport in the period 2015–2019. Even if much has to be done to improve the knowledge on the tourism–environment nexus, this paper represents a first relevant step towards an approach that can be easily implemented in all EU countries.

Public R&D and Science – Industry Links in Economic Development: Implications for Bosnia and Herzegovina

The paper presents the current understanding of the role of public R&D in economic growth and the science–industry links from middle-income economies like Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). In the second part, we present the conventional view on science–industry links which see these linkages primarily in terms of a one-way transfer of knowledge or its commercialisation from R&D to the business enterprise sector. Based on the comparative data, which also includes BiH, we show an alternative approach and argue about its relevance in the context of BiH. Our conclusion is that science–industry links (SIL) should support technology upgrading and not (or not only) R&D based growth. In the next section, we present the current understanding of the role of public R&D in economic growth. Section two explores the role of public R&D in the catching up context, while section 3 explores specifically the role of science-industry links in catching up context. Section 4 proposes a ‘Triple Helix’ approach to science - industry linkages for catching up economies. We illustrate its features within the data for the central and east European economies. Finally, section 5 concludes with implications for BiH