featured

2015 was a year of many wins and losses for Ukraine. In the first half of the year, Ukraine faced a near-perfect storm of escalating military conflict, falling commodity prices and political instability. As a result already low export revenues went even further down and foreign currency reserves dropped to 5 billion dollars.

Estonia leads the rankings of women percentage in party memberships with 54%. This means that women form the majority of the party memberships, but they are not influential enough to have an effect on parties’ policies, electoral lists formation and at the end also on election outcomes.

Luckily, the world community in Paris was not as unrealistic as the German Federal Government. The climate treaty expressly allows for the equalization and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. Now it\'s up to politicians to align national and international ambitions with the realism of social development and actual climate dynamics.

The purely staff-related nature of the reforms and the statements by Law and Justice\'s politicians leave no doubts that the media fight has one objective: undermining the public media’s ability to scrutinise the actions of the government. The attempt to turn the Polish media into a propaganda tool of the government has already been noticed abroad.

Europe has chosen to define itself as an open society. This allows for individual freedom. But it also gives enemies the opportunity to destroy open spaces, guaranteed by the state, intentionally and with the aim of causing maximum harm. However, it is not only terrorists who are putting the European model at risk.

Tax rates are a political decision with fiscal impacts. And despite the fact that all voters are influenced by taxes, at least voters who have a strong opinion on the issue of excise duties (e.g. alcohol, tobacco, etc.) affect the election outcome.

To better understand the need for a change in policy, this article first provides a brief overview of the current legislation and its implementation in member states and then looks at how current proposals for new minimum rates were formed. Finally, it evaluates whether increasing taxes on alcohol is the best course of action.

The sequence of events in Poland might sound familiar to many of you. Hungary experienced quite a similar scenario. Clearly, Poland is not an isolated case. Political radicalisation and anti-democratic backtracking might be contagious.

President Andrzej Duda has just signed the act passed recently by both the Polish parliament (o, hail, the parliamentary majority of Law and Justice!) and the Senate (yay! another session held at 3am!) that is to alter the way in which Constitutional Tribunal operates. So now instead of 5 independent judges we\'ll have 15 (thus 13 will be necessary to make a binding decision) judges of somewhat dubious background while all claims will be scrutinized according to the chronological order in which they have been filed. Sounds sound, but is it really?

You were \'nice\'? Here is a reward. You were \'naughty\' – here is a punishment. There is a kind of a social contract between an individual and Santa Claus. This simple and intuitive logic is not uncommon in many cultures. But I cannot help at wonder: what would Santa Claus be like if he was a government figure?