Abstract Latin American countries could only avoid to fall further behind their East Asian competitors if they adopt neo-liberal reforms. This is because external help cannot substitute for internal reforms and because Latin American countries lack the basis for cooperative policy implementation...

So far, economic analyses of NATO enlargement have been restricted to aspects of regional security while political analyses focused on indirect peace-building effects on democracy in the first place. Our panel regressions for 25 post-communist countries for the period from 1996 to 2008 reveal...