Suchergebnisse

Russian authorities' decision to grant the Sputnik V vaccine emergency approval in August 2020 sent shock waves across the scientific and policy-making communities. How did Russia acquire the capacity to develop and produce a vaccine against SARS-Cov-2 so quickly? Based on a case study of the institutions and firms involved in the development and production of Sputnik V, I argue that this capacity results from efforts by Russia's national security state to turn a Cold War advantage in the development of biological weapons into a contemporary public health advantage in vaccine and drug development. Since at least the late 2000s, the Russian state has pursued a form of security motivated statecraft aimed at supporting both the growth of handpicked domestically-owned biotechnological firms – with their growth being deemed essential to ensuring the pharmaceutical security of Russia's population and Armed Forces – and the upgrading of state research institutes involved in Russian biodefense – i.e. in defending civilians and military troops against naturally occurring dangerous pathogens or pathogens potentially used in biological weapons. Yet contemporary Russia has also supported those specific firms and research institutes largely because these have had a pre-existing competitive advantage in the science of genetic engineering that they inherited from their involvement in the Soviet Union's enhanced – effectively, the world's most advanced – biological weapons program from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s in direct violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.

AbstractWhile in Western Europe occupational plans dominate private pension provision, coverage of such plans is marginal in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Previous literature has shown the World Bank's instrumental role in persuading CEE countries to divert part of their social security contributions towards mandatory personal pensions. The dominance of the Bank's model of pension privatization from the mid‐1990s largely explains the marginalization of occupational plans. However, as this model has been challenged since the late 2000s, occupational pensions (OPs) have re‐appeared on the agenda. To shed light on the changing politics of OPs, this article focuses on the role of organized interests—namely employers' associations, trade unions, and financial groups—that are key players in Western Europe, but whose role has been understudied in CEE. The article follows these actors' activities in the last three decades of pension politics in Poland, i.e., one of the few CEE countries to have promoted occupational provision. It shows that, although organized interests had limited policy expertise and mainly mobilized social consent for—or opposition to—reform in the early phases of post‐communist pension reform, the growing organizational resources of business groups—in contrast with unions—make them increasingly influential actors in reshaping the contours of CEE private pension provision.

European governments are increasingly retreating from public pension provision and promoting the expansion of private pension funds. Analysts of comparative social policy have traditionally considered that the politics of pension privatisation is driven by politicians' and socioeconomic actors' concerns about the generosity and costs of pension arrangements. But, when they are fully funded instead of being financed on a pay-as-you-go basis, pensions generate funds that are injected into the financial system. The existence of such a welfare–finance nexus means that stakeholders in the pension system are also attentive to how pension funds invest their assets, and may try to actively shape the institutional design of pensions in accordance with such financial concerns. This article focuses on the role of organised labour and business, that is, employers and the financial industry, in pension privatisation and develops theoretical expectations on how these actors' interest in maximising control over private pension funds' financial assets affects pension politics. The argument is tested with a case study of French pension privatisation between the 1980s and the 2000s.

Since the global financial crisis, those East European countries that had partly privatized their pension systems in the 1990s or early 2000s increasingly scaled back their mandatory private retirement accounts and restored the role of public provision. What explains this wave of reversals in pension privatization and variation in its outcomes? Proponents of pension privatization had argued that it would boost domestic capital markets and economic growth. By revealing how pension privatization helped increase sovereign debt and how large a part of pension funds' assets was invested in government bonds, the crisis strengthened the position of domestic opponents of mandatory private accounts. But these actors' capacity and determination to reverse pension privatization depended on the level of their country's public debt and on pension funds' portfolio structure. Empirically, the argument is supported with case studies of Hungarian, Polish, and Slovak pension reform.