EU

The year 2017 brought wins and failures. The Ukrainian Government was able to approve important reforms, which was still not sufficient to receive scheduled assistance from the IMF and the EU. 2018 will be tough as Ukraine should make large progress in many areas, while the 2019 elections are approaching.

It is Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán who is to defend the Law and Justice (PiS) government against the consequences of violations of the rule of law in Poland. These violations have led eventually to the reactions set out in the EU treaties. The Polish ruling party can blame only itself.

The tendencies towards greater intrusion into people\'s privacy were visible well before 9/11 and can be imagined even without the elements of its influence. The transition to e-prescriptions, online banking and voting – these are daily routines in Estonia and will be rather sooner than later in other parts of the Western world as well.

Including new member states to ensure further cohesion in wider Europe, while at the same time continuing to address inequality, racism, and nationalism are the pathways that should be followed for the EU to avoid less desirable scenarios.

The presented case study provides a review of the rationales behind state ownership and the decisions to establish SOEs and delineates specific implications of these policies. Its main focus are SOEs in Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia.

Automotive industry plays one of the most important roles in economies of the Visegrad Group countries. The sector became the regional leader in export and a reason for close ties among countries. Hyundai Kia in the Czech Republic and Slovakia is a textbook example of how one company ignores artificial national borders.

It became clear that Ukraine has failed to receive the third and final tranche of the MFA III. Initially, the MFA III at EUR 1.8 bn was agreed in 2015 under a number of conditionalities that envisaged 22 measures in the areas of energy, public financial management, anticorruption policy, etc.

LFMI launches Employment Flexibility Index 2018 for the EU and OECD. The index is based on the World Bank’s Doing Business data on labor market regulation and covers a set of indicators on hiring, working hours, redundancy rules, and redundancy costs.

The current social pillars are divisive, but the divide is not across the “East-West” lines or even the “liberal-socialist” lines; rather, it goes along the “reality-delusion” lines. Sadly, the proposed social pillars will not make delusional politicians to accept reality

In 2017, the looming threat of communism has not vanished completely. According to a poll conducted by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, 44% of American youth would prefer living under socialism, 7% under communism, and only 42% chose capitalism.