How much a country is talked about in the media can determine its place in the public debate. In this brief, SITE researchers Maiting Zhuang and Svante Strömberg study the amount of news coverage devoted to European countries in the Swedish press. They document a systematic difference between Western and Eastern Europe and explore underlying factors that could be important in explaining this East-West divide.

At the end of December, a new law banning the punishment of whistleblowers was introduced in Sweden. Several prominent researchers, including House of Innovation's Associate Professor Anna Essén, are figuring out what private and public organizations need to consider when implementing the law.

New research from the House of Innovation explores how displaced persons living in extreme precarity engage in mundane everyday organizing practices in order to become recognized as subjects who matter.

In Ekonomisk Debatt, SITE researcher Anders Olofsgård sheds light into what we can learn about the effectiveness of development aid from literatures at the macro, micro and meso- levels. What are we talking about when we talk about development aid?

Policy brief: The Belarus economy was already struggling to generate growth before both the corona pandemic and the political protests following the August presidential election. The lack of growth was the result of an incomplete transition process to modernize the economy combined with a strong reliance on the Russian economy and its dependence on international commodity prices that have not paid off in recent years. With the added political turmoil and, so far, lack of a new political and economic strategy, the economic outlook for Belarus looks grim. Even if a full-blown crisis may be avoided by restrictive economic policies, stagnation will nevertheless be the most likely outcome without fundamental reforms.

Policy brief: Women are generally under-represented in political offices worldwide, and their under-representation becomes larger in more senior positions. This brief reviews some recent academic literature in economics and political science on the likely causes of women’s under-representation.

Policy brief: In recent years, press freedom in many Eastern European countries has increasingly come under threat. This policy brief provides an overview of the importance of a free press for democracy and the challenges to media freedom in these European transition economies.

New research on innovation suggests that RegTech providers are currently focused mostly on internal processes and associated compliance. The study recommends that RegTech providers begin offering solutions for the strategic management of regulations and not just pure compliance.

Fragile states are particularly vulnerable to adverse economic shocks and in need of international support. Through constructive collaboration with international partners, however, fragile state governments can successfully pursue ambitious reform agendas for the short and long run. SITE and MISUM (Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets) invited the Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Somalia, Dr. Abdirahman Dualeh Beileh, and the Swedish ambassador to Somalia, Staffan Tillander, to discuss the role of international partnership in the recent development of economic reforms in Somalia.

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted nearly every part of the globe. In the early phase of the pandemic, countries adopted nonpharmaceutical interventions. These interventions included school closures, travel restrictions, curfews, and quarantines. These strategies were motivated by the need for “social distancing” in order to slow the spread of the COVID-19 virus. But it was not always clear which of these interventions work best. For this reason, governments were faced with the dilemma of acting both quickly and correctly.