After years of stagnation and political cataclysms, Georgia tried to recover by launching radical economic and political reforms starting in 2004. The results of the reforms appeared to be impressive. The country’s GDP has more than doubled; the total volume of bank deposits is five times...

The paper deals with the impact of the global financial crisis on public service delivery - mainly education and healthcare - in Belarus. The pre-crisis period of 2003-2008 was the most prosperous in recent history. These trends resulted in a pretty good fiscal performance. Nevertheless, the...

This paper provides an overview of public expenditures on education and healthcare in Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine and some other countries of the former Soviet Union before and during the global financial crisis. Before the crisis, the governments of these countries...

The report analyzes the impact of the global financial crisis on public services delivery in education and healthcare. The analysis has been undertaken from the macro-perspective. Pre-crisis and crisis economic developments are outlined and fiscal accounts developments are presented. The...

This study reviews the impact of the global financial crisis on public service delivery in the Republic of Moldova. It provides a background of the country’s development in the period prior to the crisis (2000 to 2007/2008) and presents the factors which determined the country’s fiscal...

The Kyrgyz Republic is one of the largest recipients of international remittances in the world; from a Balance of Payments measure of remittances, it ranked tenth in the world in 2008 in the ratio of remittances to GDP, a rapid increase from 30th place in 2004.Remittances can be used to maintain...

When Victor Yanukovich won Ukraine’s presidential election in February 2010, it marked the official end of the Orange Revolution. State governance has become more predictable since then and even provided for short-term economic stability, but it may have come at the expense of...

Most EU governments reacted to the global economic crisis with a dramatic increase in spending. Their reactions had two main goals in mind: first, to bailout failing financial systems and second, to substitute the decline in private demand with a boost in aggregate public spending. For Bulgaria,...

Can Europe avoid falling in to a Japanese-style stagnation trap? In this type of trap, we see a repeated cycle of a financial crisis leading to a fiscal crisis, leading to a decline in consumer and investor confidence, and a resulting fall in demand. The decline in growth that inevitably follows...

The euro crisis has been extensively discussed in terms of economics, finance, political intrigues, and European institutions, but a key aspect—the political economy of the crisis—has received little attention. Politicians and social scientists from emerging economies, especially...