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- Author: Ahmed Alili
- Publication Date: 01-2017
- Content Type: Working Paper
- Institution: Center for Economic and Social Development (CESD)
- Abstract: On 20th January, Donald John Trump, an American businessman and TV entertainer is going to be 45th President of the United States of America (US). This is a hard-to-be comprehended statement by the academic and research communities, who did not expect the result of the US presidential elections to turn out this way. The possibility of Trump’s victory was repeatedly denied by the major research centres, and each scandal encouraged researchers to re-state their predictions on the soon-to-be collapse of the Trump election campaign. Needless to say, these predictions were proven false by the final election results. Nevertheless, in the end, the academic and policy research communities have not produced research on what Trump’s presidency would look like. The same stands true for the foreign governments of the EU, Russia, China, and the rest of the world. In order to figure out who is the new US President and what he can do, the world has entered into a phase of intensive research on Trump. This paper is an attempt to puzzle out Trump’s foreign policy for the Caucasus and Azerbaijan.
- Topic: Foreign Policy, Political Theory, Geopolitics
- Political Geography: America, Azerbaijan
- Author: Rashad Hasanov
- Publication Date: 01-2017
- Content Type: Working Paper
- Institution: Center for Economic and Social Development (CESD)
- Abstract: Without a doubt, 2016 is considered as one of the painful years for the economy of the country. That is to say, the economy of the country encountered nearly 4.0 % decline [during January-November 2016 GDP fell by 3.9% compared with the previous year, SSCRA1], the depreciation of national currency continued, as a result, manat lost its value by 12.5% during the year. The depreciation of national currency reached 57% from January, 2015 until December, 2016. Inflation rate increased to 12.1%, hitting a two-digit level first time since 2008 and consequently, real income of population shrank by 3.2%. The tight monetary and credit policies of the government led to weakening economic activity, lending level fell to the minimum, 11 banks were closed (one of them being systematically important). The state budget revenues and expenditures executed with respectively 16.1% and 10% decrease in 2016, compared with the January-November, 2015.
- Topic: Economics, International Political Economy, Finance
- Political Geography: Azerbaijan
- Author: Baronia Nitisha
- Publication Date: 03-2017
- Content Type: Working Paper
- Institution: Institute of European Studies
- Abstract: Due to economic, political, and cultural disparities between member states, the European Union (EU) has been unable to form a pan-European political and cultural identity. This has resulted in a long-term vote capturing opportunity for far-right political parties, which have brought Euroscepticism to the EU’s doorstep through election to the European Parliament (EP). Furthermore, because of their ability to emphasize these deeply rooted economic, political, and cultural disparities, far-right eurosceptic Members of European Parliament (MEPs) exacerbate Euroscepticism in a self-sustaining cycle that both internally and externally threatens EU legitimacy and, if left unaddressed, the very future of European integration.
- Topic: International Affairs, Brexit
- Political Geography: Europe
- Author: Alon Levkowitz
- Publication Date: 01-2017
- Content Type: Working Paper
- Institution: The Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies (BESA)
- Abstract: Kim Jung-un’s new year declaration that North Korea will test its new ICBM this year (2017) poses a further challenge to the incoming Trump administration. It is truly a “rogue state” – a country that conducts nuclear tests in defiance of the UN Security Council, and that is willing to sell conventional and non-conventional weapons to other rogue regimes, including Israel’s enemies. The nuclear cooperation between North Korea, Syria and Iran forces Israel into new alliances to counter this threat.
- Topic: Nuclear Weapons, International Security, Nuclear Power
- Political Geography: North Korea, Global Focus
- Author: Adam Garfinkle
- Publication Date: 04-2017
- Content Type: Working Paper
- Institution: Foreign Policy Research Institute
- Abstract: By now the world knows that U.S. military forces for the first time since the onset of the Syrian civil war in 2011 have attacked regime targets. Plenty of the basic facts are known about what transpired about 18 hours ago, but a few important ones are not—at least not in the public domain. For example, we have only a very general Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) report. This matters because Tomahawk cruise missiles are very accurate if “lite” weapons. Knowing what the four dozen or so missiles hit and missed, deliberately and otherwise, could tell us a lot about why the President, presumably with Secretary of Defense James Mattis’ guidance and concurrence, chose the lesser of three options presented at what has been described as a meeting of considerable length. That, in turn, could tell us if the intention ultimately is to coerce the Russians into coercing the Syrians to stop doing monstrous things to their own people, and possibly coercing them to support a compromise political settlement to the war; or if it’s just an Eff-You gesture designed only to relieve the sudden pressure of moral unction that unexpectedly came upon our new Commander-in Chief—who seemed to lurch from coldblooded Randian to “Godtalk” invoker of the American Civil Religion in the wink of an eye. In other words, knowing more about the target set would tell us whether there is any political strategy attached to the use of force, or not. Probably not.
- Topic: International Security, Military Affairs
- Political Geography: America, Middle East, Syria
- Publication Date: 05-2017
- Content Type: Working Paper
- Institution: Transparency International
- Abstract: This manifesto contains 39 recommendations to address corruption in our country and the UK’s role in facilitating corruption globally. These five priority actions, building on past government announcements, deserve cross-party support, and could be introduced swiftly.
- Topic: Corruption, International Security
- Political Geography: Global Focus
- Author: Steve Goodrich
- Publication Date: 01-2017
- Content Type: Working Paper
- Institution: Transparency International
- Abstract: It is well established that companies based in the UK’s Overseas Territories (OTs) and Crown Dependencies are widely used in money laundering and grand corruption cases.1 The absence of any public information about them allows corrupt beneficial owners to buy luxury goods and property with anonymity and enjoy their ill-gotten gains with impunity. Journalists, citizen investigators and businesses looking to find out who’s behind these anonymous corporate entities hit a brick wall whenever they encounter them, and rely almost entirely on periodic leaks like the Panama Papers to unveil who really owns them.2 Their use is so problematic that the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) has openly cited their opacity as a strategic risk to the UK.3
- Topic: Corruption, International Political Economy
- Political Geography: Global Focus
- Author: Patrick Martin
- Publication Date: 04-2017
- Content Type: Working Paper
- Institution: Institute for the Study of War
- Abstract: ISIS is waging a renewed offensive campaign in recaptured areas that could exploit vulnerabilities in the Iraqi Government’s ability to respond amidst accelerating political competition before upcoming elections.
- Topic: War
- Political Geography: Iraq
- Author: Matt Collin, Theodore Talbot
- Publication Date: 06-2017
- Content Type: Working Paper
- Institution: Center for Global Development
- Abstract: Child marriage is associated with bad outcomes for women and girls. Although many countries have raised the legal age of marriage to deter this practice, the incidence of early marriage remains stubbornly high. We develop a simple model to explain how enforcing minimum age-of-marriage laws creates differences in the share of women getting married at the legal cut-off. We formally test for these discontinuities using multiple rounds of the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in over 60 countries by applying statistical tests derived from the regression discontinuity literature. By this measure, most countries are not enforcing the laws on their books and enforcement is not getting better over time. Separately, we demonstrate that various measures of age-of-marriage discontinuities are systematically related to with existing, widely-accepted measures of rule-of-law and government effectiveness. A key contribution is therefore a simple, tractable way to monitor legal enforcement using survey data. We conclude by arguing that better laws must be accompanied by better enforcement and monitoring in to delay marriage and protect the rights of women and girls.
- Topic: Development, Gender Issues
- Political Geography: Global Focus
- Author: Justin Sandefur, Tessa Bold, Nicholas Barton
- Publication Date: 06-2017
- Content Type: Working Paper
- Institution: Center for Global Development
- Abstract: Public employees in many developing economies earn much higher wages than similar private-sector workers. These wage premia may reflect an efficient return to effort or unobserved skills, or an inefficient rent causing labor misallocation. To distinguish these explanations, we exploit the Kenyan government’s algorithm for hiring eighteen-thousand new teachers in 2010 in a regression discontinuity design. Fuzzy regression discontinuity estimates yield a civil-service wage premium of over 100 percent (not attributable to observed or unobserved skills), but no effect on motivation, suggesting rent-sharing as the most plausible explanation for the wage premium.
- Topic: Employment, Global Political Economy
- Political Geography: Kenya