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: 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.

New research on innovation and entrepreneurship suggests that institutions and policies within the space industry have effectively shrunk the entrepreneurial field there, leaving little room for enterprise.

New research on innovation suggests that high flexibility and low complexity in a firm’s response to new regulations is the best combination to yield improved innovation performance.

House of Innovation Assistant Professor, Erik Wetter, joined a panel of data experts convened in late 2020 to address concerns about data, analytics, automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.

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.

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.

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.