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We study the effects of the 2008–2009 global economic crisis on the household experience of bribing public officials. The data come from the Life in Transition-2 survey, conducted in 2010 in 30 post-socialist economies of Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. We find that households hit by crisis are more likely to bribe and, among people who bribe, crisis victims bribe a wider range of public officials than non-victims. The crisis victims are also more likely to pay bribes because public officials ask them to do so and less likely because of gratitude. The link between crisis and bribery is stronger in the poorest countries of the region. Our findings support the conjecture that public officials misuse sensitive information about crisis victims to inform bribe extortion decisions.

AbstractDuring the late 1960s, the long post-war economic boom which had characterised the advanced capitalist countries began to fade away. In its wake came an equally long era of stagnation, decline, and political and economic turbulence. Unemployment, inflation, falling profitability, business failures and bankruptcies were the new order of the day, and it became commonplace to see fearful headlines about the possible collapse of the global financial system or even of accumulation itself.

The current global financial turmoil, triggered by the US subprime crisis, has spread quickly and resulted in the worst global economic crisis since the 1930s. As the world's third largest economy and the second largest trading nation, China is inevitably affected seriously. How China responds to the crisis and how effective its measures are in sustaining a healthy growth will have important implications, both domestically and internationally. The chapters in this volume are divided into five sections. Section one examines the overall impact of the global economic crisis and the responses of the Chinese government. Section two studies the regional aspect of the economy affected by the crisis. Section three explores such economies of the Mainland's southern neighbors as Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and the prospect of China's trade. Section four surveys the impact on the ideological and social aspects of the country. Section five concludes with an assessment of China's external policies. The volume offers a comprehensive and in-depth assessment of the impact of the crisis and the measures of the Chinese government to overcome the difficulties.

Korean policy-makers constructed the global economic crisis as a purely external threat to the domestic economy. This understanding of the crisis supported a selective retreat from neo-liberalism. More problematically, the construction of the crisis as an exogenous phenomenon allowed policy-makers to focus on maintaining short-term growth without seriously addressing the structural weaknesses of the economy that the crisis should have drawn attention to. Levels of household debt in Korea have risen since the crisis and are considerably higher than in the USA. Equally, the economy remains over reliant on exports as a source of growth. (Pac Rev/GIGA)

Inequality has always been with us. With the growth of capitalism across the globe, inequalities of income, wealth and power became increasingly extreme. Written by economist Douglas Dowd, this book shows that the present banking crisis is the result of the growth of inequality across the globe. The expansion of the financial sector has brought incredible riches to a select few, at the expense of the majority. Inequality was ignored, or described as a necessary aspect of a booming global economy. With the collapse of the world markets, the fallacy of this position is clear. Inequality and the Global Economic Crisis shows how it is only by addressing inequality that we can secure the health of our economies in the future.--Publisher