Russia’s war on Ukraine entails lost human capital, both in actual lives lost and due to major disruptions to key functions of the society, such as education and research. In light of this, the FREE Network, together with the Centre for Economic Analysis (CenEA) and the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE), hosted the public conference “Higher Education and Research in War and Peace“ in Warsaw on the 10th of September 2022. This policy brief is based on the presentations and panel discussions held during the conference.

Ukraine is currently receiving substantial inflows of foreign aid from western donors to help the country withstand the Russian aggression. The foreign aid flows partly reflect altruistic motives from the donor side, but also donor’s domestic strategic foreign policy objectives as the war is seen as part of a battle over the future world order. In this brief, Anders Olofsgård, discuss the academic literature that has analysed the existence and consequences of strategic motivations behind aid flows more generally, and draw some preliminary insights for the case of Ukraine.

Against the background of fast rising gasoline and diesel prices in 2022, a number of European countries have reduced fuel tax rates, often in the form of temporary “gas tax holidays”. In this policy brief, SITE researchers Julius Andersson and Celina Tippmann, analyse the tax incidence by comparing the gasoline price development in Sweden to that in Denmark, where the fuel tax rate remained unchanged.

Sweden has attracted a lot of interest as one of few countries that did not impose mandatory lockdowns or curfews in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. New research studies show local Swedish media in this environment affect individual behavior. Read the latest SITE working paper where researchers Marcel Garz (Jönköping University) and Maiting Zhuang (SITE), investigate the effects of media coverage on compliance with public health recommendations during the Covid-19 pandemic in Sweden.

The concern of Russian gas supply disruption and its implications has never been as serious. Chloé Le Coq, Professor at the University of Paris II Panthéon-Assas (CRED) and a Research Fellow at the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE), discusses how nudging energy consumers to lower their demand may support the plans of the European Commission (EC).

SITE and NES (New Economic School) researchers investigate how multinational firms manage their relationships with governments under the threat of expropriation. Exploring micro data from the oil and gas industry worldwide, they show that the multinationals delay investment, production and tax payments by more than five years in countries with weak institutions relative to countries with strong ones. These findings are consistent with the theory suggesting that delaying rents to the government in absence of formal enforcement could decrease the risk of expropriation.

SITE and FREE Network researchers investigate the factors that correlate with awareness and support for domestic violence legislation in Latvia, Russia and Ukraine, three countries that introduced recent reforms. The working paper is based on a cross-country survey on perceptions and prevalence of domestic and gender-based violence conducted within the FROGEE project.

This brief summarizes the research papers presented at the 2022 FROGEE conference “Economic and Social Context of Domestic Violence”, which took place on May 11, 2022. It was organized by the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) together with the Centre for Economic Analysis (CenEA) and the FREE Network.

The eruption of war exposes women to increased gender-based violence, in the immediate conflict area as well as in the countries where they seek refuge. Acknowledging the specific conflict-related risks that women face is important, in order to target interventions, especially considering that the actors that sit at peace negotiation tables are predominantly or exclusively men.

Policymakers in Europe are currently faced with the difficult task of reducing our reliance on Russian oil and gas without worsening the situation for firms and households that are struggling with high energy prices. The two options available are either to substitute fossil fuel imports from Russia with imports from other countries and cut energy tax rates to reduce the impacts on firms and household budgets, or to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels entirely by investing heavily in low-carbon energy production.