EU Central Asia Strategy: Partnership for sustainable development
How can the EU contribute to a continued development in the right direction for Central Asia?
Ukrainian energy market in transition: How can it succeed in a new geopolitical setting?
NUPI and NUCC invites leading experts to share their views in recent changes in the Ukrainian energy market.
Russia’s Reorientation to the East: How Much Does Economy Matter?
This policy brief assesses Russian involvement in the growing Asia-Pacific economies, and offers an overview of the Far Eastern dimension of Russia’s economic relations with its major Asian partners, 2010–2016. It discusses the dynamics of investment and trade relations, and reflects on Russia’s changing economic priorities before and after the conflict with Ukraine and introduction of international sanctions, with a focus on implications for Russia–Asia relations in the Russian Far East.
Professional Networks in Transnational Governance
Who controls how transnational issues are defined and treated? In recent decades professional coordination on a range of issues has been elevated to the transnational level. International organizations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and firms all make efforts to control these issues. This volume shifts focus away from looking at organizations and zooms in on how professional networks exert control in transnational governance. It contributes to research on professions and expertise, policy entrepreneurship, normative emergence, and change. The book provides a framework for understanding how professionals and organizations interact, and uses it to investigate a range of transnational cases. The volume also deploys a strong emphasis on methodological strategies to reveal who controls transnational issues, including network, sequence, field, and ethnographic approaches. Bringing together scholars from economic sociology, international relations, and organization studies, the book integrates insights from across fields to reveal how professionals obtain and manage control over transnational issues.
Russia’s turn to Asia: Myanmar seen from Moscow
Russia has made increased engagement with Asian countries declared priority. This ‘turn to the East’, marked by the extravagant APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit in Vladivostok in 2012, is driven by both internal considerations (developing Russia’s huge eastern territories) and external ones (perceived shifts in the global balance of economic and political power). Since the events of 2014, with relations with the West deteriorating into confrontation and sanctions, Russian interest in further developing ties with Asia has only increased.
Norway and the European Economic Area: Good Deal or Just an EU Rule-Taker?
'After more than 20 years in the European Economic Area (EEA), it may look as if this remains the solution for Norway – part of the EU's single market but not an actual EU member state. There is no great political push to change Norway's status for now but there are still debates on the political, economic and institutional pluses and minuses of being on the margins of the EU not at its heart,' author Ole Gunnar Austvik writes in this op-ed.
ICT, growth and happiness
This paper reviews two strands of literature. The first is on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and growth. The increasing role of ICTs came together with stagnating growth rates in many countries. This has been denoted the Solow paradox. During the dot-com era from the mid-1990s, many believed that the paradox was solved. Growth rates increased and the internet became pervasive. The great recession has been followed by lower growth in Europe and in the United States and a return of the Solow paradox. Evidence indicates that the share of internet users in a population had a positive effect of growth in the 1990s, but that this effect vanished for developed countries after 2000. The second strand of literature is a heterogeneous research tradition that relates ICT not to income and growth, but to human well-being. That literature indicates positive (as well as some negative) effects of ICT and the internet on people’s happiness. Some new evidence indicate that the share of internet users in populations in a panel of countries is positively related to average happiness.
The governance of global wealth chains
This article offers a theoretical framework to explain how Global Wealth Chains (GWCs) are created, maintained, and governed. We draw upon different strands of literature, including scholarship in International Political Economy and Economic Geography on Global Value Chains, literature on finance and law in Institutional Economics, and work from Economic Sociology on network dynamics within markets. This scholarship assists us in highlighting three variables in how GWCs are articulated and change according to: (1) the complexity of transactions, (2) regulatory liability, and (3) innovation capacities among suppliers of products used in wealth chains. We then differentiate five types of GWC governance – Market, Modular, Relational, Captive, and Hierarchy – which range from simple ‘off shelf’ products shielded from regulators by advantageous international tax laws to highly complex and flexible innovative financial products produced by large financial institutions and corporations. This article highlights how GWCs intersect with value chains, and provides brief case examples of wealth chains and how they interact.