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Has UN Peacekeeping become more deadly? Trends in UN Fatalities
No full textThis article examines trends in UN peacekeeping fatalities using a new dataset on UN fatalities. The principal findings of the article are as follows: fatality rates and ratios due to accidents and malicious acts are on the decline. Nevertheless, the same cannot be said for illness-related fatality rates and ratios. Indeed, this report provides strong evidence, that UN fatalities due to illness follow an upward trajectory: increasingly troops, police and military observers die due to illness-related causes while serving in UN missions
Unemployment and separation: Evidence from five European countries
No full textTo what extent are economic difficulties associated with union instability? Since the 1970s, several European countries have experienced both high rates of union dissolution and high unemployment rates. This article uses the experience of five European countries before the recent economic crisis to explore the relationship between both individual and aggregate unemployment and union dissolution risk. Using rich longitudinal data from Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, and Italy, discrete-time models show that male partner’s unemployment increases the risk of union dissolution in all countries. Female partner’s unemployment is associated to more varied effects and is only significant in countries where it is standard practice to be in paid employment. The effect is always of lower magnitude than the male partner's unemployment. Interestingly, there is no association between unemployment and union dissolution at the macro level for men. In France and Belgium, we find that individual unemployment during a recession lowers divorce risk for women, while it increases them in Italy. Findings are interpreted in light of the different ways that individual unemployment may be perceived during recession
Russia and the European Court of Human Rights: The Strasbourg Effect
No full textRussia and the European Court of Human Rights: The Strasbourg Effect, edited by Mälksoo and Benedek, focuses on a pressing issue in the field of human rights law: the impact of the case law of the European Court of Human Rights in decaying democratic contexts and authoritarian settings and the reception of the Convention and its standards by domestic judges in such environments. The book is timely due to two recent developments that set Russia aside from the other forty-six member states of the Council of Europe. First, there is a significant political standoff between the Russian Federation and the Council of Europe, evidenced in the suspension of voting rights for Russian national parliamentarians sitting in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in 2014 in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea.1 Since then Russia has stopped paying its contribution to the ordinary budget, bringing the Council of Europe into serious financial difficulty. Second, in December 2015, an amendment to the Federal Constitutional Law of the Russian Federation granted the Russian Constitutional Court the power to declare opinions from international human rights bodies “impossible to execute.”2 In this way, Russia has become the first Council of Europe member state to have a domestic constitutional process designed to resist the implementation of individual judgments of the European Court of Human Rights.
The book is comprised of twelve chapters and an introduction. Part I one of the book examines the relationship between Russia and the European Court of Human Rights and the Council of Europe over time. Part II addresses the legislative and judicial reception of the Convention standards in Russia. Part III has three case studies exploring Russia’s response to judgments concerning gross human rights violation cases in Chechnya, right-to-property cases, and cases concerning the rights of LGBTI individuals. The final part of the book focusses on identifying the range of factors that explain the impact and reception of the European Court of Human Rights in Russia, although every chapter in the book also does this, offering its own account of and explanation for impact and reception.
Overall, the book argues that the effects of the European Court of Human Rights in Russia have been selective and limited, but that the impact and reception have variations not only across issue areas but also across time.
Roter, exploring the periodization of the variation of the Strasbourg Effect in Russia, identifies three key phases (Chapter 1). The first period between the accession of Russia to the European Convention on Human Rights until the mid-2000s is identified as comparatively good times where both domestic and international actors had meaningful hopes that the influence of the Strasbourg Court would bring about domestic reforms in Russia. The period from the mid-2000s until the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014 is characterized as a period in which there was a massive influx of cases against Russia and slow compliance but continuing participation in the Council of Europe machinery, like any other state. From 2014 onward a new period began, which is characterized as one of open resistance to Strasbourg in Russia, albeit with a degree of à la carte compliance, in particular with respect to the payment of compensation to victims of human rights violations, which have continued in this period. According to this periodization, Strasbourg’s Russia problem really started in 2014, a time when Russia could no longer be understood as just another country with a large number of pending cases and a compliance problem.
The issue-specific investigations of the Strasbourg Effect further support the claim that the reception and impact of the European Court of Human Rights vary across groups of cases. While the Chechen cases (Leach, Chapter 8), which identify gross human rights violations by security forces, have been some of the hardest cases in terms of lack of implementation of the judgments, the Russian judiciary and legislature have been more responsive, using Strasbourg decisions finding a violation of the right to property (Starzhenetskiy, Chapter 9) to reform parts of the property regime of the Russian Federation. With respect to the protection of LGBT rights (Bartenev, Chapter 10), the book underlines that these cases did not face open resistance from apex courts early on, but that that the LGBT cases in the current post-2014 context do have the potential to deepen the open resistance of Russian authorities to the European Court of Human Right
Interests, Institutions and Provincial outward FDI in China
No full textThis dissertation presents a comparative qualitative analysis on the determinants of provincial outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in China. During the last decade, China’s OFDI turned into a provincial phenomenon. In 2015, 97 percent of Chinese investors came from provinces and municipalities with only ten provinces and municipalities accounting for more than 60 percent of China’s total OFDI flow. These provincial investors tend to be private companies, often of small and medium size, accounting sometimes for more than 70 percent of the officially approved investment projects of a province in a given year. While mainstream theory of OFDI suggests, that foreign investors need certain advantages when they engage in overseas projects, these provincial investors are often distinct; unlike large central state-owned enterprises (SOEs), they are often confronted with financial constraints, difficulties to access relevant information, and lack international experience. However, they are able to invest in distant regions that lack political stability and good infrastructure as well as in regions that have strong international competitors. This dissertation asks: Why do some Chinese provinces have such high OFDI, despite their investors often facing multiple impediments?
Whereas previous research considered the determinants for Chinese OFDI mostly through a firm-level lens of motivations enriching it with institutional theory, few studies step up to the provincial level. This research argues that a combination of provincial path dependencies, provincial institutional configurations and multiple actors’ interests can explain the phenomenon at hand. While path dependencies offer insights into conducive initial conditions that provide a basis for provincial OFDI patterns and growth, provincial formal and informal institutional configurations can explain how enterprises are able to reduce their additional costs and risks associated with foreign investment activities. Finally, provincial interests by bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic actors explain the emergence of these institutional configurations. These have developed due to strategic-alignment of OFDI policies with provincial economic conditions, and as a side effect of other revenue-seeking non-political and foreign actors, who are present in these provinces.
Designed as an inductive endeavour, this dissertation bases results on fieldwork with 66 interviews in two provinces, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, as well as Chinese primary sources. It addresses a gap in and offers an alternative perspective to the literature on the determinants of Chinese OFDI. It also contributes to the literature on spatial variation and provincial policy-making and implementation in China, which has not studied the case of OFDI so far. In theoretical terms, it discusses the limitations of the distinction between and the blurriness of formal and informal institutional configurations at the given case. On most abstract terms, this research contends that China’s global integration into the world economy is far from being an overall trend. Instead, it should be understood as a spatially uneven phenomenon with some provinces and regions being not only more integrated than others, but being a major force behind this process
A Decade Long Grievance? The Global and Financial Economic Crisis' Impact on Institutional Trust
No full textBanking crises and exports: Lessons from the past
No full textThis paper analyzes the impact of banking crises on manufacturing exports, exploiting the fact that sectors differ in their needs for external financing. Relying on data from 160 developed and developing countries during 1970–2012, we analyze 147 banking crisis episodes and separate their impact on export growth from the impact of other exogenous shocks (e.g., demand shocks, exchange rate shocks). Our findings show that during a crisis, the exports of sectors more dependent on external finance grow significantly less than other sectors. However, this result holds only for sectors that depend on banking finance as opposed to interfirm finance (i.e., trade finance or trade credit). For sectors that depend heavily on banking finance, the effect of banking crises on exports is robust, additional to external demand shocks, and not driven by exchange rate shocks
The State of State Capacity: a review of concepts, evidence and measures
No full textThis working paper is part of the research programme on Institutions, Governance and Longterm Economic Growth, a partnership between the French Development Agency AFD and the Maastricht Graduate School of Governance Maastricht University UNUMerit. The research builds on the Institutional Profiles Database IPD, jointly developed by AFD and the French Ministry of the Economy since 2001.What is state capacity and how does it affect development The concept of state capacity acquired centrality during the late seventies and eighties, sponsored by a rather compact set of scholarly works. It later permeated through several disciplines and has now earned a place within the many governance dimensions affecting economic performance. The present article aims to provide a historical account of the evolution and usage of the state capacity concept, along with its various operationalizations. It examines in particular a the growing distance in the usage of the concept by different disciplinary and thematic fields; b the process of branching out of the concept from restricted to more multidimensional definitions; c the problems with construct validity and concept stretching, and d the generalized lack of clarity that exists regarding the institutional sources of state capacity
Public Administration Characteristics and Performance in EU28, Synthesis report prepared for the European Commission under the Contract VC/2016/0492 “Support for developing better country knowledge on public administration and institutional capacity building
No full textSalmon migration and fertility in East Germany – An analysis of birth dynamics around German reunification
No full textThis paper uses rich administrative data from the Deutsche Rentenversicherung (German Pension Fund) to describe changes in the timing and the spacing of births that occurred in the period following German reunification. We examine differences in the birth dynamics of East Germans, West Germans, and women who migrated between the two parts of Germany in these years. As the pension registers provide monthly records on whether a person is living in East or West Germany, they also allow us to examine the role of regional mobility in birth behaviour. In particular, we test the “salmon hypothesis”, which suggests that migrants are likely to postpone having a child until after or around the time they return to their region of origin. Our investigation shows that a large fraction of the cohorts born in 1965-74 migrated to West Germany after reunification, but that around 50% of these migrants returned to East Germany before reaching age 40. The first birth risks of those who returned were elevated, which suggests that the salmon hypothesis explains the behaviour of a significant fraction of the East German population in the period following German reunification
