1,721,111 research outputs found
Ukraine at a Crossroads
Get PDFThe Orange Revolution in the fall of 2004 built great hopes for a better future for Ukraine. However, three years later those hopes have been replaced by disappointment, frustration and confusion. Although progress in the areas of political freedom, pluralism, civil rights and freedom in the media remains unquestionable the record of economic, institutional and legal reforms is much more problematic. The key macroeconomic indicators are not better than they were few years ago and the business climate has barely improved. The WTO accession process remains incomplete. The perspectives of Euro-Atlantic integration are continually subject to heated domestic political controversies. The political situation remains unstable, mostly due to the hasty constitutional changes that were adopted during the Orange Revolution. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the state of the Ukrainian economy at the end of 2007 and reflect upon what kind of reform program the Ukrainian government should consider, regardless of its political color. The reforms suggested in this paper involve a broad agenda of macroeconomic, social, structural and institutional measures. This agenda goes beyond the purely economic sphere and also addresses issues of legal, administrative and political reforms. The politics and political economy of any future reform effort will not be easy because the country is deeply divided in political, cultural, regional and ethnic terms. In such an environment, crucial reforms and strategic decisions will require a wider cross-party political consensus.Ukraine, Orange Revolution, CIS, transition, European Naighborhood Policy, Euro-Atlantic integration
What Can Arab Countries Learn From Post-communist Transition?
Get PDFThe commentary by Marek Dabrowski on what Arab countries can learn from the post-communist transition of the early 1990s, after the political uprisings against the authoritarian regimes in the Arab world
The future of fiscal federalism
Get PDFTo predict the future it is always useful to study the past. The past can help us understand how the world evolved and might suggest possible developments for the future. However, the past must be considered a reference point, or a marker, and not an anchor. To see the future as the mirror image of the past is to ignore that progress and evolution always imply change. --
Challenges and Trajectories of Fiscal Policy and PFM Reform in CEE/CIS
Get PDFThe purpose of this study is to provide an overview of fiscal policies and PFM reforms in 7 countries in the Western Balkans and 12 countries in the CIS, including major macroeconomic and poverty trends, fiscal policy, the size and role of the public sector, public expenditure management and its linkage to policy development, the organization of budget processes on the central and local levels, the role of various actors and tools in PFM, including civil society and the international donor community. The period of 2003-2007 was characterized by an extraordinary high rate of economic growth, both worldwide and in the CEE/CIS region. This created macroeconomic room for meeting numerous development challenges: reducing poverty and inequality, improving the quality and coverage of public services, upgrading infrastructure, and advancing various reforms, including those related to PFM. However, the economic situation deteriorated dramatically in 2008 as a result of the global financial crisis, with deep recession hitting most of the countries in 2009 and bleak perspectives for subsequent years. It remains to be seen whether the crisis situation will force governments to speed up necessary reforms. In the PFM area major tasks concern lengthening fiscal planning horizon and gradual movement toward performance oriented budgeting the measure which can allow better expenditure targeting and decrease volatility in expenditure allocation), increasing budget transparency and creating real room for civil society involvement into a budget process. However, the reforms must also involve a broadly defined governance sphere, i.e. improving transparency and accountability of government, modernization of civil service, decentralization, including building a genuine system of local and regional self-government, and other similar measures to improve quality of public services and social policy interventions.public finance management, fiscal policy, Central and Eastern Europe, Western Balkans, Commonwealth of Independent States, social policies, social services, children and families
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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