The need for urgent climate action and energy transformation away from fossil fuels is widely acknowledged. Yet, current country plans for emission reductions do not reach the requirements to contain global warming under 2°C. What is worse, there is even reasonable doubt about the commitment to said plans given recent history and existing future investment plans into fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure development. This policy brief shortly summarizes the presentations and discussions at the SITE Development Day Conference, held on December 8, 2021, focusing on climate change policies and the challenge of a green energy transition in Eastern Europe.

This year’s SITE Development Day conference will focus on environmental policy in Eastern Europe, with a particular emphasis on global warming, energy transformation, and energy security.

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: Russia’s real GDP fell by a modest 3 percent in 2020. The question addressed here is how a major oil-exporting country can go through the COVID-19 pandemic with a decline of this magnitude when oil prices fell by 35 percent at the same time as the domestic economy suffered from lock-downs. The short answer is that it is mainly a statistical mirage. Read the policy brief to learn more!

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.

Policy brief: There are great expectations that vaccinations will enable a return to normality from COVID-19. However, there is massive variation in vaccination efforts, vaccine access, and attitudes to vaccination in the population across countries. This policy brief compares the situation in a number of countries in Eastern Europe, the Baltics, the Caucasus region, and Sweden. The brief is based on the insights shared at a recent webinar “Addressing the COVID-19 pandemic: Vaccination efforts in FREE Network countries” organized by the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics.

After having been relatively mildly affected in the first wave, Eastern Europe is currently in the midst of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic with much higher levels of infected and dead compared to the spring. This health crisis not only has economic consequences, but also has contributed to political instability in parts of the region. Learn more on the presentations and discussions held at the SITE Development Day conference 2020!

Policy brief: Today’s political crisis in Belarus has given a rise to the phenomenon classified in political science as political illegitimacy. However, this is not a pure political phenomenon. It causes adverse and severe economic adjustments. In a short-term perspective, it gives a rise to numerous risks of financial destabilization. Moreover, it is likely to deepen the current recession and make it protracted. In the long-term, political illegitimacy causes adverse institutional adjustments and erosion of human capital, which is likely to lead a country into a long-standing depression.

What are the developments of gender gaps in the labour market and social norms related to labour market activity? Authors from BEROC, BICEPS, CenEA, CEFIR, ISET PI and SITE discuss change of labour markets in the latest FROGEE brief.

Last year marked an important milestone as the world celebrated the 30-year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the first post-communist election in Poland. Despite the latest developments, there is still a large democratic gap between transition countries that became EU members and other transition countries.