BACKGROUND Poliomyelitis is a highly infectious disease caused by poliovirus, which becomes difficult to manage/eradicate in politically unstable areas. The objectives of this study were to determine the movement and management of such polio outbreaks in endemic countries and countries with reoccurring cases of polio and to determine the effect of political instability on polio eradication. M...

a r t i c l e i n f o Firms in many developing countries cite macroeconomic instability and political uncertainty as major constraints to their growth. We conduct a randomized experiment in post-revolution Egypt to measure the impact of insuring microenterprises against this uncertainty. Demand for macroeconomic shock insurance was high, with a take-up rate of 36.7%. However, purchasing insuran...

This paper has three objectives: First, to review the literature dealing with the assessment and evaluation of political risk by managers in international firms. Second, to build upon this literature by extending and more precisely defining the concept in a manner that facilitates integration into the planning or decision-making process. Last, the paper attempts to suggest fruitful directions f...

the disappearance of bipolar system following the disintegration of the soviet union, has also changed many strategic concepts. central asia, as a part of the soviet empire, has become an arena for regional and global challenges after these transformations. the region, already faced with various political, economic, social and cultural problems, soon became a location for the activities of isla...

In this paper, I study the impact of political risk on sovereign default. An extended model of Alesina and Tabellini (1990) shows that political instability increases the likelihood of default. To test the theoretical implication, a panel logit model is adopted to estimate the effect of political factors, along with other macroeconomic variables on the probability of default. Data from 68 count...

The often-posed claim that Europe is a pessimistic continent is not unjustified. In 2012, 53 percent of European Union (EU) citizens were pessimistic about their country. Surprisingly, however, societal pessimism has received very little scientific attention. In this article, we examine to what extent political and economic factors drive societal pessimism. In terms of political factors, we exp...

This paper explores the institutional factors behind the crisis of capital accumulation in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s. Because of its focus on institutional stability, the paper contributes to the literature on the existence of an apartheid social structure of accumulation in which economic and political institutions are important determinants of investment. Investment function estimat...

China has developed a more consequential role in Sudan over the past two decades, during which it has become bound up in the combination of enduring violent internal instability and protracted external adversity that has characterized the politics of the central state since the 1989 Islamist revolution. Two inter-related political trajectories of China’s Sudan engagement are examined here. The ...

Spring | Summer 2010 121 This article analyzes the dynamics of development, democracy, and conflict in Georgia, focusing on variation in state capacity, political institutions and varieties of nationalism. Whereas Georgia’s ethnic nationalism substituted for political institutions in the 1990s, the state’s enhanced administrative capacities after 2003 inhibited it from returning to ethnic natio...

We analyze the deficits of the German Länder for the period from 1960 to 2005 and test a number of hypotheses derived from the literature on the political economy of public deficits. Estimating a dynamic panel data model, we find evidence for political opportunism in the spirit of Rogoff and Sibert: German voters seem to favor fiscal discipline as debt issue is significantly lower in pre-electi...