Articles

The project of the hockey Team Europe is a practical example of advantages coming form a flexible approach. First of all, it enables those European countries which have an established competitive team toenter on their own. At the same time, Team Europe is an amazing solution for countries with a handful of excellent hockey players, yet not enough to create a team which would be competitive on the international scene.

The past two weeks were chiefly engulfed by news concerning banks and regulations in relation to cryptocurrencies. Providing some balance on the other side of the spectre were positive pieces introducing Bitcoin´s newfound capacity to cover electricity bill payments in Japan or coffee-breaks in Russia.

In the times of Polish People\'s Republic, when religion and all other key aspects of Polish identity were being actively supressed, the interests of the Catholic Church in Poland as an institution and the interests of raison d\'etat were aligned to a great extent. Today it is not the case.

Let us remind you that many posts at the state-owned enterprises require an access to classified information. This means that in order to be able to work there one must acquire the so-called “confirmation of security” issued by Internal Security Agency (ABW) or – in the case of military institutions – Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW).

In 2015, the USAID Leadership in Economic Governance (LEV) Program conducted a large-scale survey of small and medium enterprises (Annual Business Climate Assessment in Ukraine). One of the features of this survey is that entrepreneurs themselves identify obstacles to doing business and reforms they expect from the state.

We believe that if the state ceases to intervene in the pricing mechanisms, the profitability of enterprises will improve, investments will increase and administrative burden on business will be reduced. On the other hand, there are certain risks that were the reason why the government abolished this regulation in the form of experiment.

In late 2015 – early 2016, when the ABCA survey was conducted, Ukrainian small and medium businesses mostly assessed business climate in the country as neutral or negative. Only 6% of the polled SMEs believed that business climate was favorable.

Recently, the operations of the newspaper Népszabadság in Hungary were suspended. So what\'s the big deal? It was a left to centre newspaper anyway, you will read some other newspaper instead. It generated giant losses, and its numbers have plummeted – you will hear, so the private owners were right to kill it off.

It looks like cryptocurrencies are once again becoming a reliable payment method for citizens living in unfavourable conditions. Just recently, Venezuela joined the ranks of the likes of Greece, China, or Cyprus in opening the gates for cryptocurrencies.

INESS members took to the streets with a physical version of the annual bureaucracy load of a new company (652 pages of forms) and polled pedestrians about their view on red tape, giving red apples to the pessimists and green ones to the more positive oriented folks.