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This article explores the political, economic, and social forces underlying the east/west cleavage in the 1994 Ukrainian presidential and parliamentary elections. We demonstrate that economic factors—notably, variations in regional economic strength and changes in employment in the period preceding the elections—are stronger predictors of country-wide voting behavior and candidate support than ethnic and linguistic factors. The exceptions are the extreme eastern and western oblasts, where the analysis suggests the existence of significant differences in political culture.

AbstractThis paper explores the economic nature of return factors by incorporating a multifactor return generating process into the traditional CAPM. It attempts to remedy the arbitrage pricing theory, which is not capable of assigning proper economic meanings to return factors. There are at least three significant factors associated with general production, investment, financial, and employment variables. These economic factors explain the risk‐return relationship as well as those obtained by the arbitrage pricing theory.

The report of the National Coal Policy Project is entitled Where We Agree to focus attention on the broad areas of agreement reached by the project participants. This one-year project brought together leading individuals from environmental and industry groups to seek consensus on important national policy issues related to the use of coal in

The rules that are employed to pass policies in legislative bodies vary widely. It is generally argued that policies that differ in complexity or importance level should be decided under different kinds of voting rules. While this question has been examined for static legislative mechanisms, an analysis of the precise relationship between the level of policy complexity and the type of voting rule is still missing for dynamic mechanisms. We address this problem from the perspective of a preference-blind political designer. Given the level of complexity of the decision that is to be made, the political designer's goal is to select the supermajority rule that avoids (1) policy instability; (2) guarantees efficiency; and (3) minimizes institutional status quo bias. We provide an answer to this objective problem, deriving a closed-form relationship between voting rule and policy complexity. Our analysis rationalizes the use of different rules to adopt different types of policy only when preferences are weak. When preferences are strong, the optimal rule is unique, and it does not vary by level of policy complexity. These findings significantly differ from those obtained for static mechanisms. Our study also implies that more complex policies are more likely to be persistent, even after a change in political preferences.

This paper looks at contemporary social policy developments in Greece and Turkey in light of exogenous economic pressures in the period 1980s-2000s. Three sources of exogenous pressures, which allegedly lead to a reduction in social expenditure budgets, are identified: globalization, the process of European integration in its EMU phase and IMF conditionality. Our case studies show that both countries were exposed to impending pressures of economic liberalization, but these exogenous pressures have not resulted in anticipated social policy outcomes. First, social expenditure levels in both countries have not declined; instead, we report rising trends in expenditure. Secondly, and especially in the case of Greece, the 20-year period analyzed shows an expansion in social welfare programmes. Thirdly, those outcomes are mediated by salient domestic political factors, such as democratization and liberalization of the political space. Finally, the positive association between an expanding welfare state and the presence of social democratic/socialist governments, reported in the literature, seems vindicated in our research.

Agriculture continues to present the regimes of the Communist world with some of their most important economic and political problems even after the trials of collectivizing are past. There are constant pressures, on the one hand, to make the collective system much more productive by improving organizational efficiency and raising the level of technology. On the other hand, the official ideology commits these regimes to eventually abolishing the collective system itself by transforming the collective farms into institutions of state property. There are indications, moreover, that this commitment may not be postponed indefinitely. The issue of how to establish a viable, permanent, and uniform organization of agriculture with completely nationalized enterprises has recurrently arisen in the Soviet Union over the last decade: in Khrushchev's "agro-town" proposal of the early 1950's, for example, with its implicit aim of eliminating the private plots of collective farmers, and in the later fairly large-scale experiments with a system of fixed wages in collective farms and with direct conversions of collective into state farms.

Renewing the momentum of reform, and thereby broadening and reviving growth, is essential if India is to achieve its economic goal of breaking out of the third world.

Neo-classical economic theory shows that managed trade or protectionism is (almost) always welfare decreasing. However, measurements of the welfare costs of protectionism based on neo-classical models seem to suggest that these costs are quite small. We discuss general new insights and developments in the theory, policy and empiricism of international trade. The observation that intra-industry trade and the services sector are important has led to a shift in theory away from constant returns to scale and perfect competition towards economies of scale and scope, externalities, market imperfections, and imperfect competition. Although this, in principle, opens the door to beneficial government intervention in the economic process, we emphasize that the true costs of protection can potentially be much higher than is generally acknowledged as a result of the above mentioned shift.

Purpose
Innovation has become the engine of economic growth, especially with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This paper aims at studying the association between innovation – measured by gross expenditure on research and development (GERD) – and economic performance – represented by real gross domestic product (GDP) – in MENA region over the period 1996-2016.


Design/methodology/approach
The paper uses the panel corrected standard error method to account for heteroskedacity and possible contemporaneous correlation across panels, and the first order autocorrelation within panel for unbalanced datasets.


Findings
The study concludes that R&D expenditure is positive and statistically significant in explaining GDP, but their relationship is weak. Specifically, a 10 per cent increase in R&D expenditure raises GDP by 4 per cent. In addition, human capital, labor force and fixed capital accumulation are found positive and statistically significant. These findings highlight on the importance of innovation and education on fostering economic growth, urging MENA governments to further invest in R&D and innovation sector.


Originality/value
To the best of the author's knowledge, this paper is the first to investigate the relationship between GERD and GDP in MENA region within the endogenous-growth model framework.

Young people play an important role in shaping Iran's politics but have only a marginal role in its economy. Youth (ages 15–29) are more than one-third of the country's population and are better educated than the generation they are replacing, while accounting for more than two-thirds of the unemployed. Demographics have thrown the marriage market out of balance, with a "shortage of men" of about 25 percent, while economic pressures have reduced the ability of youth to get married and form families. The higher education system has expanded to absorb ever greater numbers of youth but because education quality is low this has not helped in reducing unemployment. The demographic pressures have amplified since 2008 when the economy entered a period of stagnation. The economic crisis has hit Iran's youth particularly hard, especially those from lower economic backgrounds because the country's rigid formal labor market preserves jobs for older workers. The record number of youth entering the labor market has to wait longer for a regular job or has to take up part-time and informal jobs. In either case, their difficulties in marriage and family formation are intensified.