The original BRICS grouping of five was not a multilateral security alliance like NATO, and neither does the recent expansion of BRICS resemble the expansion of NATO. The members of the expanded BRICS are divided between those that are largely hostile toward the West in general and the US in...

Conditionality is a concept frequently linked to funds received from international financial institutions by countries in trouble. Most cases depend on the financial support to developing countries of the IMF, but also of other institutions like the World Bank, ADB, IBD, EIB or the EBRD that are...

This Working Document explores the implications of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) as an ambitious EU foreign policy for the development of a European political community. It suggests that the ENP can be viewed as an attempt to reconcile two potentially contradictory processes. The first...

The CIS countries' EU-related interests are very heterogeneous. The countries themselves differ not only in terms of their geopolitical and geo-economic situations, and how those affect their relations with the EU, but also in their levels of ambition in relation to the Union, as well as their...

This paper studies the determinants of economic growth and the role of the public budget in European Union (EU) member states in Central and Eastern Europe, that joined the European Union in 2004, with a balanced data set from 1996 until 2012. A special focus is set on the relationship between...

This paper investigates how the European integration process of central eastern European countries, which has been taking place since the 1990's, affects their GDP growth. Based on an augmented Solow model, I estimate a convergence equation for a panel of ten countries over 16 years (1995-2010)....

This paper examines the transition process within Eastern Europe and the integration process with the EU and shows that the requirements for the transition towards a market economy overlap with the requirements for EU accession. Furthermore, the economic situation of the candidate countries is...