Did you miss the chance to attend the book launch event "Rebuilding Ukraine: Principles and policies" presented by Torbjörn Becker, Beatrice Weder di Mauro and Veronika Movchan on 11 January? Watch the recordings to learn more about their framework for Ukraine’s post-war reconstruction co-written together with leading scholars and experts.

Did you missed the chance to attend the annual SITE 2022 Development Day conference? This policy brief shortly summarizes the presentations and discussions at the SITE Development Day Conference, held on December 6, 2022. The main focus of the conference was how to maintain and organize support for Ukraine in the short and long run, with the current situation in Belarus and the region and the ongoing energy crisis in Europe, also being addressed.

On December 6, 2022, Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE) hosted the annual Development Day, this year focusing on how to maintain and organize support for Ukraine. See photos and highlights from the conference to learn more.

This year’s SITE Development Day conference will focus on the Russian war on Ukraine. We will discuss the situation in Ukraine and neighbouring countries, how to finance and organize financial support within the EU and within Sweden, and how to deal with the current energy crisis.

Carl Bennet and the Marianne & Marcus Wallenberg Foundation join forces to sponsor a new professorship at the Stockholm School of Economics. This enables internationally acclaimed Martina Björkman Nyqvist to continue her important research on development economics and children’s health and education as the new Carl Bennet & Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Chair in Economics.

In August, Celine Zipfel, Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at SSE, was awarded for ​​outstanding pedagogical achievements at SSE. Celine was awarded for her work in redesigning an MSc course on Development Economics with great success. The course was highly appreciated among students, covering a wide range of topics and giving a holistic view of the field.

Russia’s fierce military campaign in Ukraine continues, but Ukraine stands their ground as the military tide is turning in their favour. But what besides the military support is needed for Ukraine to win the war?

Russia’s war on Ukraine entails lost human capital, both in actual lives lost and due to major disruptions to key functions of the society, such as education and research. In light of this, the FREE Network, together with the Centre for Economic Analysis (CenEA) and the Stockholm Institute of Transition Economics (SITE), hosted the public conference “Higher Education and Research in War and Peace“ in Warsaw on the 10th of September 2022. This policy brief is based on the presentations and panel discussions held during the conference.

Ukraine is currently receiving substantial inflows of foreign aid from western donors to help the country withstand the Russian aggression. The foreign aid flows partly reflect altruistic motives from the donor side, but also donor’s domestic strategic foreign policy objectives as the war is seen as part of a battle over the future world order. In this brief, Anders Olofsgård, discuss the academic literature that has analysed the existence and consequences of strategic motivations behind aid flows more generally, and draw some preliminary insights for the case of Ukraine.

SITE and NES (New Economic School) researchers investigate how multinational firms manage their relationships with governments under the threat of expropriation. Exploring micro data from the oil and gas industry worldwide, they show that the multinationals delay investment, production and tax payments by more than five years in countries with weak institutions relative to countries with strong ones. These findings are consistent with the theory suggesting that delaying rents to the government in absence of formal enforcement could decrease the risk of expropriation.