In July 2014, against the backdrop of an escalating conflict in Ukraine and the crash of a civilian passenger airliner in the active combat zone there, the OECD's sanctions against Russia were severely toughened. A ban was imposed on the issuance of long-term loans (for periods over 90 days) to...

Ratings of institutional quality are widely known and used in academic literature. Among such ratings are some whose compilation procedure took decades to perfect. Dozens of assessments have been accumulated, pertaining to a large and growing list of countries. These ratings use expert...

Modern approaches to immigration policies in most developed countries make the problems of adaptation for new arrivals more severe. Protracted failure to adapt among immigrants (and even of their descendants) turns into recurrent problems vis-à-vis the law, and even extends into large scale...

Scientists are human. As such, they are prone to bias based on political and economic interests. While conflicts of interest are usually associated with private funding, research funded by public sources is also subject to special interests and therefore prone to bias. Such bias may lead to...

The ratings of economic and political institutions are well-known and widely used in the Social Science literature. These ratings are heavily relied on Experts' evaluations with subjective ordinal ranking (i.g., from -10 to 10 points). Such evaluations can be occasionally driven by ideological...

Small well-motivated groups, including state officials, public and community activists, politicians, etc., proved their capacity to impose burden on the economy. The power to do so in modern Market Democracies could be reached without “unsheathing the sword”. Old fashioned redistribution...

In this paper we tested the hypothesis of the "political" basis for the "economic" rights. We constructed our own variables of political regimes' classification for years 1820-2000. We found significant positive interdependencies between the Democracy's indicators and Economic Growth. Protection...

If the authorities have the opportunity to receive incomes uncontrolled by society, this gives them great freedom of action. Such incomes do not depend on the quality of the public goods delivered, nor on the investment climate. Given a certain minimal level of organization, taxpayers can try to...

Can the absence of freedom of speech, a monopolized media market, and a politicized education create obstacles which will stand in the way of economic growth? The answer is an unambiguous Yes, and substantially. Partial, biased, or heteronomous mass media and an education turned into a...