Among ENP countries, Azerbaijan is outstanding because it leans on its resource base and sees the EU at the receiving end of bilateral relations. At the other extreme, Ukraine depends on EU cooperation, especially with respect to trade. We develop a comprehensive theoretical concept for...

This paper analyses potential internal and external determinants of institutional change as measured by the World Bank Governance Indicators (WBGI) based on a panel of 25 transition countries for the period from 1996 to 2005. We show that natural resources and capital inflows exert an...

This paper analyses the transformative power of NATO accession that gains in importance due to the enlargement fatigue of the EU, the EU’s rather weak neighbourhood incentives and the increasing importance of regional security as an incentive for compliance with the institutional standards of...

This paper quantifies the impact of incentives related to potential membership on institutional change as measured by the World Bank Governance Indicators (WBGI). Based on a panel of 25 transition countries for the period from 1996 to 2008 we show that pre-accession incentives provided by EU and...

The effectiveness of NATO conditionality for institutional reforms is highly controversial. Some papers argue that any effect this conditionality might have had may be due to endogeneity effects, i.e. NATO may have picked the winners. We argue that this is not the case. First, NATO-Mazedonia...

Russia and China are assumed to challenge democratization and to promote autocracy. In a first step, we analyze Central Asia as the most-likely case, considering both Russia and China as relevant external actors. We develop a concept for our analysis based on the different strategies of Russia...

This study investigates the role of government activity in economic growth, arguing that economic systems are important and that, therefore, one size of government does not fit all countries. Taking a panel of 111 countries over the years from 1971 to 2010, we consider clusters of economic...

Bolivia's macroeconomic performance in the period 1994 to 1998 is analyzed and compared with the performance in former periods and the performance of other developing countries (grouped according to income, region, and debt status). This allows to assess what has been achieved in Bolivia since...

The paper takes into account both the concerns of the EU, arguing that convergence is incomplete, and the demands from accession countries, claiming that monetary integration is optimal. Indicators are developed which measure convergence and optimality in comparison with a reference group of the...