The Nonprofit Sector in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia PDF Download

Author: David Horton Smith
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004380620
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
The Nonprofit Sector in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia (EERCA), edited by David Horton Smith, Alisa V. Moldavanova, and Svitlana Krasynska, uniquely provides a research overview of the nonprofit sector and nonprofit organizations in eleven former Soviet republics, with each central chapter written by local experts. Such chapters, with our editorial introductions, present up-to-date versions of works previously published in EERCA native languages. With a Foreword by Susan Rose-Ackerman (Yale University), introductory and concluding chapters also explain the editors’ theoretical approach, setting the whole volume in several, relevant, larger intellectual contexts, and summarize briefly the gist of the book. The many post-Soviet countries show much variety in their current situation, ranging from democratic to totalitarian regimes.

Author: Alexander S. Bulatov
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527533735
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 483

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Book Description
This volume offers analyses of the basic tendencies and the problems of Russia, Eastern Europe, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and the Baltic states. It covers the Russian economic model; the rates and proportions of the Russian economy; its real, financial, external, and social sectors; investment and fixed assets; human capital; and economic policy. East European, Transcaucasian, Central Asian and Baltic economies are then analysed using the same perspectives. This allows a comparison of the economic progress of the post-Soviet countries, highlighting the differences and the similarities between them. This book will be useful for students, professors, and businessmen interested in cooperation with the post-Soviet countries.

Author: Martin Myant
Publisher: Wiley Global Education
ISBN: 1118138090
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Transition Economies provides students with an up-to-date and highly comprehensive analysis of the economic transformation in former communist countries of Eastern and Central Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union. With coverage extending from the end of central planning to the capitalist varieties of the present, this text provides a comparative analysis of economic transformation and political-economic diversity that has emerged as a direct result. It covers differences between countries in terms of economic performance and integration into the world economy. Transition Economies seeks to explain and deepen understanding of these differences, chart the emerging forms of capitalism there, and provide country responses to the world financial crisis of 2008-2009.

Author: Thomas Davies
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351977490
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 933

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Book Description
Offering insights from pioneering new perspectives in addition to well-established traditions of research, this Handbook considers the activities not only of advocacy groups in the environmental, feminist, human rights, humanitarian, and peace sectors, but also the array of religious, professional, and business associations that make up the wider non-governmental organization (NGO) community. Including perspectives from multiple world regions, the book takes account of institutions in the Global South, alongside better-known structures of the Global North. International contributors from a range of disciplines cover all the major aspects of research into NGOs in International Relations to present: a comprehensive overview of the historical evolution of NGOs, the range of structural forms and international networks coverage of major theoretical perspectives illustrations of how NGOs are influential in every prominent issue-area of contemporary International Relations evaluation of the significant regional variations among NGOs and how regional contexts influence the nature and impact of NGOs analysis of the ways NGOs address authoritarianism, terrorism, and challenges to democracy, and how NGOs handle concerns surrounding their own legitimacy and accountability. Exploring contrasting theories, regional dimensions, and a wide range of contemporary challenges facing NGOs, this Handbook will be essential reading for students, scholars, and practitioners alike.

Author: Steven E. Silvern
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811576467
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
This book explores how religious groups work to create sustainable relationships between people, places and environments. This interdisciplinary volume deepens our understanding of this relationship, revealing that the geographical imagination—our sense of place—is a key aspect of the sustainability ideas and practices of religious groups. The book begins with a broad examination of how place shapes faith-based ideas about sustainability, with examples drawn from indigenous Hawaiians and the sacred texts of Judaism and Islam. Empirical case studies from North America, Europe, Central Asia and Africa follow, illustrating how a local, bounded, and sacred sense of place informs religious-based efforts to protect people and natural resources from threatening economic and political forces. Other contributors demonstrate that a cosmopolitan geographical imagination, viewing place as extending from the local to the global, shapes the struggles of Christian, Jewish and interfaith groups to promote just and sustainable food systems and battle the climate crisis.

Author: Maureen A. Lewis
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 9780821348062
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 44

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Book Description
Informal payments in the health sector of Eastern and Central Asia are emerging as a fundamental aspect of health care financing and a serious impediment to health care reform. These informal payments, made to individuals or institutions in cash or in kind, are nearly always for services that are meant to be covered by the health care system. Such private payments to public personnel have created an informal market for health care , and are a form of corruption. This problem's roots are traced to declining revenues which have not coincided with a reduction in buildings, hospital beds and health personnel. In these circumstances informal payments compensate for lost earnings, and therefore reforms to modernise the region's health systems must compete with individuals' personal revenues. Options for addressing this problem include comprehensive anticorruption policies, downsizing of the public health system, reducing the set of services sibsidised by the state, encouraging cost sharing with those who can afford it, improving accountability, and promoting private alternatives.

Author: Jean-Louis Racine
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 0821385097
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
Standards are everywhere, yet go mostly unnoticed. They define how products, processes, and people interact, assessing these entities’ features and performance and signaling their level of quality and reliability. They can convey important benefits to trade, productivity, and technological progress and play an important role in the health and safety of individual consumers and the environment. Firms’ ability to produce competitive products depends on the availability of adequate quality-support services. A “national quality infrastructure” denotes the chain of public and private services (standardization, metrology, inspection, testing, certification, and accreditation) needed to ascertain that products and services introduced in the marketplace meet defined requirements, whether demanded by authorities or by consumers. In much of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, national quality infrastructure systems are underdeveloped and not harmonized with those of their trading partners. This imbalance increases trade costs, hinders local firms’ competitiveness, and weakens overall export performance. The objective of Harnessing Quality for Global Competitiveness in Eastern Europe and Central Asia is to highlight the need to reform and modernize the institutions in the region toward better quality and standards. The book ties in with much of the work done in the World Bank on the business environment, trade facilitation, economic diversification, and enterprise innovation. The countries in the region can improve this situation, revising mandatory standards, streamlining technical regulations, and harmonizing their national quality infrastructure with those of regional and international trade partners. Most governments will need to invest strategically in their national quality infrastructure, including pooling services with neighboring countries and stimulating local awareness and demand for quality. Specifically for the countries of the former Soviet Union, the restructuring process will need to improve governance, thus eliminating conflicts of interest and providing technically credible services to the economy.

Author: Maurizio Bussolo
Publisher: World Bank Publications
ISBN: 1464803536
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 363

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Book Description
Compared to other regions, Europe and Central Asia are by far the oldest. Moreover, population aging is set to accelerate further over the coming decades as large segments turn old. Additionally, some countries such as Russia and certain Eastern European countries are facing a shrinkage of their population. Against this backdrop, this report investigates what stands in the way of societies reaping the full benefits of increased longevity--that is, longer lives and potentially prolonged payoffs from human capital--and what can help to mitigate the possible negative impacts of a smaller and older workforce. Beginning with a focus on demographic trends, the report puts the rapid decline in fertility and contrasting migration trends in the region in a historical perspective and looks forward to the varying paths that population change may follow in the region. Next, it examines the evidence on the likely impact of demographic change on growth and savings, the labor force, firm and economy-wide innovation, poverty and inequality, and intergenerational solidarity. Finally, the report goes beyond diagnostics and puts an emphasis on what we know regarding successful policy interventions, presenting evidence on what has and has not worked in the past.--Publisher description.

Author: Gwendolyn Sasse
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509560610
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 102

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Book Description
On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, giving rise to the deadliest conflict on European soil since the Second World War. How could this happen in twenty-first-century Europe? Why did Putin decide to escalate Russia’s war against Ukraine, a war which began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014? In this timely book, Gwendolyn Sasse analyses the background to this war and examines the factors that led to Putin’s fateful decision. She retraces the history of Ukraine’s struggle for independence from Russia and shows how democratic developments in Ukraine had become a risk for Russia’s political system. She also shows that ambiguous Western policy towards Russia encouraged elites in the Kremlin to think that they had more room for action than they did. The result is a brilliant analysis of the background to the war, a concise account of the course of the war itself and a timely reflection on what its consequences will be – for Ukraine, for Russia and for the West. An indispensable book for anyone who wants to understand the most dangerous conflict of our time.

Author: Michael E. O'Hanlon
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
ISBN: 0815732589
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
In this new Brookings Marshall Paper, Michael O'Hanlon argues that now is the time for Western nations to negotiate a new security architecture for neutral countries in eastern Europe to stabilize the region and reduce the risks of war with Russia. He believes NATO expansion has gone far enough. The core concept of this new security architecture would be one of permanent neutrality. The countries in question collectively make a broken-up arc, from Europe's far north to its south: Finland and Sweden; Ukraine, Moldova, and Belarus; Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan; and finally Cyprus plus Serbia, as well as possibly several other Balkan states. Discussion on the new framework should begin within NATO, followed by deliberation with the neutral countries themselves, and then formal negotiations with Russia. The new security architecture would require that Russia, like NATO, commit to help uphold the security of Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, and other states in the region. Russia would have to withdraw its troops from those countries in a verifiable manner; after that, corresponding sanctions on Russia would be lifted. The neutral countries would retain their rights to participate in multilateral security operations on a scale comparable to what has been the case in the past, including even those operations that might be led by NATO. They could think of and describe themselves as Western states (or anything else, for that matter). If the European Union and they so wished in the future, they could join the EU. They would have complete sovereignty and self-determination in every sense of the word. But NATO would decide not to invite them into the alliance as members. Ideally, these nations would endorse and promote this concept themselves as a more practical way to ensure their security than the current situation or any other plausible alternative.