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on Confederation of Independent States |
| By: | Karasov, Oleksandr; Rinne, Tiina; Järv, Olle; Tenkanen, Henrikki (Aalto University) |
| Abstract: | Cultural ecosystem services (CES) lack a coherent, universal metric capturing the experiential quality of their use. We argue that the personal quality of time spent outdoors, adapted from cultural consumption such as books, music, or films, offers such a metric, but its empirical use requires scalable, secure, and accessible participatory mapping infrastructures. Existing public participatory GIS (PPGIS) tools rely on standalone applications, costly recruitment, and predominantly one-way data flows from citizens to researchers. These limitations are exacerbated in crisis contexts, such as the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, where physical gatherings and the handling of personal data pose security risks. We address both gaps with an open-source, modular Python framework that transforms Telegram, a widely popular messenger in Ukraine, into a secure, GDPR-compliant PPGIS tool, complemented by an interactive dashboard. We piloted the 'Pryroda' Telegram bot along the Dnipro waterfront in Kremenchuk, central Ukraine, in 2025. 219 anonymous participants mapped 230 locations, of which 82% were rated as enjoyable. Random Forest models and statistical association tests consistently showed that the social and behavioural context of a visit, as well as access mode, predict enjoyment more strongly than visitors' socioeconomic profiles, while perceived negative changes since 2022 emerged as the strongest individual-level correlate of poor experience. The framework eliminates installation, recruitment, and licensing costs that constrain PPGIS in developing and crisis settings, and demonstrates that quality of time can serve as a foundation for a coherent theory of value in CES research. |
| Date: | 2026–05–06 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:42jxy_v1 |
| By: | Matthijs Leusen; Harry Garretsen; Francesco Giumelli; Tristan Kohl |
| Abstract: | We examine how Western sanctions imposed in response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine shaped firm-level stock market performance in the EU and the US. To measure sanction exposure, we link firms to the specific products targeted by US and EU sanctions at the HS6 level, producing a detailed, firm-level indicator. We use a classical finance event study to analyze investor reactions around three salient moments in the pre-invasion period: Biden’s initial sanction threat, the collapse of US-Russia diplomatic talks, and the first sanctions announcement. We complement this with a staggered difference-indifferences design that exploits cross-firm variation in the timing of product level listings to trace the effects of sanctions as they accumulated over time. Stock market losses in the EU are substantially larger than in the US, and the gap between sanctioned and non-sanctioned firms is modest and shortlived. Investors price in sanction risk ahead of formal implementation, and subsequent expansions of existing sanction regimes generate little additional market response. |
| Keywords: | economic sanctions, event study, geopolitical risk, Russia-Ukraine war, anticipation effects, sender costs |
| JEL: | F51 F13 F14 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12650 |
| By: | Michal Brzezinski (University of Warsaw, Faculty of Economic Sciences) |
| Abstract: | Three decades after the fall of communism, GDP convergence is widely cited as evidence that the post-socialist transition succeeded. But GDP is a narrow measure of living standards. This paper asks whether convergence toward Western Europe holds up once health, inequality, and leisure are also taken into account. We construct a comprehensive welfare measure for Poland, Czechia, Hungary, Slovakia, and Russia, benchmarked against Germany, covering the 1980s through 2022. In every country, welfare relative to Germany falls well below what GDP alone would suggest. Russia’s welfare stands at roughly half its GDP level, driven by the post-Soviet mortality crisis and extreme inequality—challenging characterisations of Russia as a “normal” middle-income country. Hungary, conventionally grouped with the Visegrad convergence successes, suffers a substantial welfare shortfall driven by decades of poor health outcomes. Poland emerges as the strongest performer in convergence dynamics. Life expectancy is the largest contributor to this gap. |
| Keywords: | welfare measurement, Eastern Europe, Russia, transition economies, living standards, life expectancy, inequality |
| JEL: | D63 I31 O57 P36 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:war:wpaper:2026-13 |
| By: | Arnold, Matthew Byron; Roller, Viktoriia; Zhyvogliad, Khrystyna |
| Abstract: | Ukraine’s Army+ and Reserve+ applications show how digital tools can transform mobilisation and military administration by re-engineering core governance processes, not simply adding apps on top of bureaucracy. By achieving a high degree of digital defence governance, Ukraine is reshaping the structural conditions under which it can sustain its defence effort – from how it mobilises people to how it supports serving personnel – and, in doing so, expanding what is politically and administratively possible in a long war. Army+ and Reserve+ are central to an adaptive governance approach that seeks to sustain a protracted war under democratic constraints, using digital channels to make mass military service more rule-bound, transparent, and legible to citizens and servicemembers, while constraining arbitrary bureaucratic discretion. Ukraine’s democratic allies should study its model to identify elements that could be adapted within their own national contexts. |
| JEL: | R14 J01 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:138317 |
| By: | Hunter L. Clark; Jeffrey B. Dawson; Shad Turney |
| Abstract: | The conflict in the Middle East has precipitated a global supply shock—the third in six years following the pandemic in 2020 and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The current shock raises the specter of spillovers to the U.S. through both prices and physical shortages of goods. A critical conduit for spillovers through these channels is via Asian supply chains, especially from middle- to lower-middle income countries in southeast Asia, which are key suppliers for goods needed for the AI infrastructure build-out in the U.S. These countries are also heavily reliant on Middle East energy imports. This post examines key factors related to these Asian supply chain vulnerabilities. |
| Keywords: | Asia; supply chain |
| JEL: | F00 |
| Date: | 2026–05–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:fip:fednls:103188 |
| By: | Juergen Amann; Sebastian Barnes; Luis Monteiro; Sidharth Goel; David Haugh |
| Abstract: | European consumers have withstood major shocks since 2019, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the energy and food price shock following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a sharp rise in the overall price level amid tightening of monetary policy. This paper constructs a new high-frequency, granular dataset from aggregated, anonymised transaction-level data from Mastercard. It estimates monthly national and TL2 subnational spending for 12 European countries and 9 COICOP spending categories from 2018 to 2024. The analysis focuses on “everyday spending”, the subset of consumption categories well captured by card payments and closest to households’ lived experience of day-to-day expenditure. Everyday spending recovered after the pandemic but has been subdued since 2022, marking a sharp deceleration relative to pre-2020 trends and has been on a weaker trajectory than suggested by annual national accounts data. Granular monthly data reveal how households adjusted spending across different categories in response to sharp changes in prices and the decline in real incomes. Subnational patterns show that poorer subnational regions experienced a stronger slowdown in everyday spending, consistent with their greater exposure to essential goods such as food and energy. At monthly frequency, increases in nominal incomes are associated with noticeable improvements in real spending. |
| Keywords: | Consumer Economics, Consumption, Data Access, Empirical Analysis, Estimating, General regional Economics, Large data sets, Methodology for collecting, Modelling and analysis, Organising Macroeconomic Data, Saving, Wealth |
| JEL: | C55 C82 D12 E21 R1 |
| Date: | 2026–05–18 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1864-en |
| By: | Yves Jégourel |
| Abstract: | On the global commodities markets, 2025 largely followed the trajectory set in 2024, with a record rise in precious metals prices against a backdrop of ever-increasing uncertainty, and base metals whose performance was once again largely determined by mining supply levels. On the softs side, cocoa and coffee retreated from past record prices, while the cereals market experienced relative price stability between 2024 and 2025, against a backdrop of abundant harvests worldwide. Oil and gas prices, for their part, have somewhat detached from geopolitical factors and returned to economic fundamentals. With supply plentiful, they ended 2025 on a downward trend, despite a sharp rebound at the end of January 2026 due to a cold start to winter. While commodities are known to be one of the most powerful barometers of the state of the world, this was not the case in 2025. In this paradoxical situation, oil prices hardly reacted to the major tensions in the Middle East, the intensification of the war in Ukraine, or the American intervention in Venezuela. Gold, on the other hand, reflected this. In a highly unstable economic and political environment, one thing is certain: the world has now fully entered the age of metals. In a race to secure supplies of strategic metals, the United States is now pulling out all the stops to try and catch up with China. Beyond the many crises and conflicts, it is the confirmation of the end of a rule-based international order and the return of spheres of influence that will make 2025 a pivotal year. |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ocp:pbcoen:pb13_26_1 |
| By: | Áron Kiss; Joana Maldonado; Alessandro Turrini; Kristine Van Herck |
| Abstract: | While the share of people born in an EU Member State and living in another continued to increase modestly throughout the last decade (from about 4% in 2014 to about 4.4% in the EU’s working age population in 2024), the share of EU working age population born outside the EU increased more dynamically, from about 8% in 2014 to more than 12% in 2024. This increase became even more dynamic since 2022, a development that is only partly explained by the arrival of people fleeing Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. Recent net migration flows broadly confirm established geographical patterns, with the largest flows moving from East to West and being directed to relatively large EU Member States with stronger economic outcomes and lower unemployment rates. Gravity equations estimating the determinants of mobility flows suggest that the ability of intra-EU relocation flows to serve as a channel of economic adjustment in the EU has continued to increase in the last decade. Immigration has significantly contributed to recent employment growth in the EU. Meanwhile, the broad-based rise in employment rates for all groups suggests that increased employment of people born outside the EU did not crowd out the employment prospects of native-born workers. It has rather permitted to ease labour supply bottlenecks in a context of decelerating working-age population growth and sustained demand for labour. |
| JEL: | J21 J61 |
| Date: | 2026–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:euf:dispap:241 |
| By: | Heng-fu Zou (The World Bank, Washington, D. C., 20433, USA) |
| Abstract: | This paper argues that Francis Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis no longer provides an adequate framework for understanding the contemporary world. In place of liberal convergence, the twenty-first century has revealed the return of great-power rivalry, civilizational self-assertion, strategic rearmament, and competing projects of world order. To explain this transformation, the paper develops a composite framework drawing on Hobbes, Schmitt, Nietzsche, and the Chinese idea of Tianxia. Hobbes clarifes the structure of insecurity in a world without a common superior power. Schmitt clarifies sovereignty, decision, and the renewed centrality of political enmity. Nietzsche clarifies rank, command, greatness, decadence, and the production of higher civilizational types. Tianxia expands the analysis beyond the Roman-Western horizon by introducing a broader imagination of world order grounded in civilizational totality. On this basis, the paper offers a comparative interpretation of China, Rome, Spain, Britain, Russia, the United States, Iran, Japan, India, and Vietnam as distinct but interacting forms of imperial or civilizational power. Its central claim is that modernity has not abolished empire or grandeur. It has multiplied their forms. The present age is therefore better understood not as the end of history, but as the return of history in a more openly Hobbesian, Schmittian, Nietzschean, and civilizationally plural world. |
| Keywords: | Nietzsche; Tianxia; Fukuyama; Hobbes; Carl Schmitt; empire; civilizational state; great-power rivalry; world order; Rome; China; America; Russia; political theology; realism; end of history |
| JEL: | B15 F51 F52 P16 N40 |
| Date: | 2026–05 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cuf:wpaper:809 |
| By: | Henri-Louis Védie |
| Abstract: | Le premier sommet des BRICS, tenu à l’initiative de la Russie en 2009, sera suivi de 16 autres, le dernier étant celui de Rio dont les travaux se sont déroulés les 6 et 7 juillet 2025. Jusqu’en 2022, un seul élargissement est intervenu, celui accueillant l’Afrique du Sud, transformant les BRIC en BRICS. À partir de 2023, en revanche, trois sommets, ceux de 2023, 2024 et 2025, vont se solder par la transformation des BRICS en BRICS+5, accueillant 5 nouveaux pays membres, en proposant un nouveau statut d’« État partenaire », qui regroupe 9 pays. La première partie de ce Policy Brief rappelle que cet élargissement, décidé par les BRICS, passant outre l’opposition de l’Inde et, à un degré moindre, du Brésil, s’est opéré à l’initiative de la Chine, qui n’a pas hésité à les affaiblir pour y conforter son leadership. Même constat avec les États partenaires, qui les éloignent définitivement de la ligne « O’Neillienne », privilégiant les pays les plus peuplés. La seconde partie confirme ce leadership sur le plan économique. C’est, en effet, et toujours à l’initiative de la Chine, avec cette fois l’assentiment de l’Inde, que les BRICS vont officiellement rejeter toute initiative conduisant à la dédollarisation de l’économie mondiale, à commencer par celle d’une monnaie commune. La création de la NBD ( Banque de développement estampillée BRICS ) est une nouvelle occasion pour la Chine de conforter son leadership, avec la création, dans la foulée, d’une BAII % chinoise destinée aux financements des infrastructures des pays de la « Route de la soie ». |
| Date: | 2026–03 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ocp:pbecon:pb16_26 |