Policy brief: The Belarus economy was already struggling to generate growth before both the corona pandemic and the political protests following the August presidential election. The lack of growth was the result of an incomplete transition process to modernize the economy combined with a strong reliance on the Russian economy and its dependence on international commodity prices that have not paid off in recent years. With the added political turmoil and, so far, lack of a new political and economic strategy, the economic outlook for Belarus looks grim. Even if a full-blown crisis may be avoided by restrictive economic policies, stagnation will nevertheless be the most likely outcome without fundamental reforms.

Policy brief: A common presumption in economics is that a carbon tax is regressive – that the tax disproportionately burdens low-income households. However, this presumption originates from early research on carbon taxes that used US data, and little is known about the factors that determine the level of regressivity of carbon taxation across countries.

Policy brief: As the dramatic consequences of climate change are starting to unfold, addressing the intermittency of low-carbon energy sources, such as solar and wind, is crucial. The obvious solution to intermittency is energy storage. However, its constraints and implications are far from trivial. Developing and facilitating energy storage is associated with technological difficulties as well as economic and regulatory problems that need to be addressed to spur investments and foster competition. With these issues in mind, the annual Energy Talk, organized by the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics, invited three experts to discuss the challenges and opportunities of energy storage.

Policy brief: Alexei Navalny is the most prominent opposition leader in Russia today. During 2020, he entered not only the domestic Russian news flows, but was a major news story around the world following his horrific Novichok poisoning in August. This brief investigates the response in the Russian stock market to news about Navalny.

New research on innovation suggests that employees that are curious about mastering their workplace, and that desire to work more effectively, will have a higher ability to find useful information in the global marketplace and commercialize it.

Fragile states are particularly vulnerable to adverse economic shocks and in need of international support. Through constructive collaboration with international partners, however, fragile state governments can successfully pursue ambitious reform agendas for the short and long run. SITE and MISUM (Mistra Center for Sustainable Markets) invited the Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Somalia, Dr. Abdirahman Dualeh Beileh, and the Swedish ambassador to Somalia, Staffan Tillander, to discuss the role of international partnership in the recent development of economic reforms in Somalia.

Although significant growth has been achieved since 2000, all of this came in the first two tenures of Putin in the Kremlin during the increasing oil prices. But is Russia still a hostage to the whims of international oil market?

On December 16-17, 2019, the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics hosted the annual Academic Conference at the Stockholm School of Economics that brought together researchers and scholars in economics and political science from all over Europe and North America contributing to a better understanding of the political economy of Eastern Europe.

Working paper: Whistleblower reward programs, or “bounty regimes”, are increasingly used in the United States. According to Professor Spagnolo and his co-auhtor, the effectiveness of these programs has been questioned, and empirical evidence on their effectiveness have been scarce likely due to their relatively recent introduction.

Working paper: This paper looks at economic growth and its fundamental determinants in Russia over the last decades. It starts by showing that, contrary to the views of some political commentators, growth is highly important for the popularity of president Putin.