Is the Russian economy “surprisingly resilient” to sanctions and actions of the West? The short answer is no. In this policy brief, Maria Perrotta Berlin and Jesper Roine, researchers from Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE), discusses the bleak economic future of Russia.

Over the last decades, there has been an ongoing shift in the way people access news. In this interview, Jonathan Lehne (researcher at SITE) discusses the importance of media literacy and how the rise of social media has spread the responsibilities for the production, dissemination, and fact-checking of news much more broadly.

Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) is looking for an Event and Office Manager to join our team. Are you a service-oriented person that wants to work at a leading international research and policy institute with daily international contact?

With sanctions becoming an increasingly important tool in ostracising autocratic regimes from western markets, the need for effective enforcement of Anti-Money Laundering (AML) policies is increasing. The global AML regime will be the backbone in detecting evasion of sanctions. This regime has, however, been widely criticised as ineffective. In this brief, Giancarlo Spagnolo and Theo Nyreröd discusses issues with the current AML regime and propose a reward scheme for whistleblowers to enable asset seizures. A powerful feature of their proposal is that it does not rely on the effectiveness of the AML regime.

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.