In the latest episode of Ekonomibyrån "The stock market in times of crisis" Torbjörn Becker, Director of the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE), discusses the crisis between Russia and Ukraine. What are the potential economic consequences and what are the long-term effects?

In a recently published op-ed in Dagens Industri (in Swedish), Torbjörn Becker shares his insights on Russia's real threat from the West, which is economic and not military.

How much a country is talked about in the media can determine its place in the public debate. In this brief, SITE researchers Maiting Zhuang and Svante Strömberg study the amount of news coverage devoted to European countries in the Swedish press. They document a systematic difference between Western and Eastern Europe and explore underlying factors that could be important in explaining this East-West divide.

The recent record-high gas prices have triggered legitimate concerns regarding the EU’s energy security, especially with dependence on natural gas from Russia. This brief discusses the historical and current risks associated with Russian gas imports. SITE researchers Chloé Le Coq and Elena Paltseva argue that decreasing the reliance on Russian gas may not be feasible in the short-to-mid-run, especially with the EU’s goals of green transition and the electrification of the economy. To ensure the security of natural gas supply from Russia, the EU has to adopt the (long-proclaimed) coordinated energy policy strategy.

The need for urgent climate action and energy transformation away from fossil fuels is widely acknowledged. Yet, current country plans for emission reductions do not reach the requirements to contain global warming under 2°C. What is worse, there is even reasonable doubt about the commitment to said plans given recent history and existing future investment plans into fossil fuel extraction and infrastructure development. This policy brief shortly summarizes the presentations and discussions at the SITE Development Day Conference, held on December 8, 2021, focusing on climate change policies and the challenge of a green energy transition in Eastern Europe.

This year’s SITE Development Day conference will focus on environmental policy in Eastern Europe, with a particular emphasis on global warming, energy transformation, and energy security.

Policy brief: Why is the IMF sending $1bn to Belarus as the country is falling deeper into repression and authoritarianism? The answer might not be what you expect.

Policy brief: In this brief, we report on the FREE network webinar on the state of vaccinations and the challenges ahead for opening up economies while containing the pandemic, held on June 22, 2021.

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: As time passes and archives open, ever more topics in Russian military-economic history can be studied with primary sources. One such theme is the colossal evacuation of industrial enterprises and equipment from July 1941 onwards. Thousands of railway cars and lorries carried equipment, raw materials, as well as personnel from Ukraine, the Baltics, and western regions of the Russian Federation to the Urals and beyond.