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Abstract
The EU and its member states have provided an unprecedented amount of military, humanitarian and financial aid to Ukraine after Russia's attack on February 24, 2022. However, while some EU member states have provided a disproportionately high level of support to Ukraine, other member states committed an unexpectedly low level of aid. This article aims to explain the diverging levels of EU member state support to Ukraine by building on theories of military burden-sharing. Methodologically, it applies the innovative fit robustness procedure of Coincidence Analysis (CNA). The results of the analysis indicate that conditions derived from theories of military burden-sharing can explain support to Ukraine. More specifically, the pattern of support was (mainly) explained by the level of threat that each member state faced from Russia, past military investments and public opinion. Conversely, in contrast to the frequently tested and confirmed exploitation hypothesis, the economic size of the member states did not have an impact on their support to Ukraine.

The EU and its member states have provided an unprecedented amount of military, humanitarian and financial aid to Ukraine after Russia's attack on February 24, 2022. However, while some EU member states have provided a disproportionately high level of support to Ukraine, other member states committed an unexpectedly low level of aid. This article aims to explain the diverging levels of EU member state support to Ukraine by building on theories of military burden-sharing. Methodologically, it applies the innovative fit robustness procedure of Coincidence Analysis (CNA). The results of the analysis indicate that conditions derived from theories of military burden-sharing can explain support to Ukraine. More specifically, the pattern of support was (mainly) explained by the level of threat that each member state faced from Russia, past military investments and public opinion. Conversely, in contrast to the frequently tested and confirmed exploitation hypothesis, the economic size of the member states did not have an impact on their support to Ukraine.

The article focuses on the Chinese port investment in the EU countries and analyses the motivation and current situation behind it from the Chinese perspective as well as explains the European perception of investment and its future prospect. The study is based on the Chinese and European official documents and Chinese scholars' articles. In recent years, the number of Chinese port investment projects in European countries has been increasing, and the role of ports as hubs in China-EU economic and trade cooperation has become more prominent. However, the negative perception of Chinese port investment in the EU also gradually increases. The EU is concerned that Chinese port investments will challenge the market dominance of European companies in the port shipping sector and cause political division within the EU, even with far-reaching geopolitical implications and security problems. Chinese academics generally believe that China's investment in EU ports is purely a matter of its own economic and trade interests rather than security considerations, and advocate that China and EU should actively promote port cooperation, follow the path of spatial integration and integration of interests, and build a multi-party community of interests for China-EU port cooperation, and require Europe to abandon the direct influence of external factors and commit to fostering a positive interaction between China and EU. It is necessary for Europe to work towards an effective cooperation between China and the EU on economic development issues and political security issues instead of creating a malicious confrontation.

AbstractUsing an unbalanced panel of firm‐level data in Bulgaria, Poland and Romania, we examine the impact of foreign firms on domestic firms' productivity. In particular, we try to answer the following research questions: (1) Are there any spillover effects of foreign direct investments (FDI), and if so, are they positive or negative? (2) Are spillover effects more likely to occur within or across sectors? (3) Are the existence, the direction and the magnitude of spillovers conditioned by sector and firm‐specific characteristics? Our findings show that FDI spillovers exist both within and across sectors. The former arise when foreign firms operate in labour‐intensive sectors, while the latter occur when foreign firms operate in high‐tech sectors. Moreover, we find that domestic firm size conditions the exploitation of FDI spillovers even after controlling for absorptive capacity. We also detect a great deal of heterogeneity across countries consistent with the technology gap hypothesis.