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"CUSTOMS UNION"
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Life in Stalin's Soviet Union
Life in Stalin's Soviet Union' is a collaborative work in which some of the leading scholars in the field shed light on various aspects of daily life for Soviet citizens. Split into three parts which focus on 'Food, Health and Leisure', the 'Lived Experience' and 'Religion and Ideology', the book is comprised of chapters covering a range of important subjects, including: Food0, Health and Housing, Sex and Gender0, Education, Religion (Christianity, Islam and Judaism), Sport and Leisure, and Festivals. There is detailed analysis of urban and rural life, as well as explorations of life in the gulag, life as a peasant, life in the military and what it was like to be disabled in Stalin's Russia. The book also engages with the wider Soviet Union wherever possible to ensure the most in-depth discussion of life, in all its minutiae, under Stalin. This is a vitally important book for any student of Stalin's Russia keen to know more about the human history of this complex period of dictatorship.
Book
Evaluating accession decisions in customs unions: a dynamic machine learning approach
Previous work in the literature on regional economic integration has proposed the use of machine learning algorithms to evaluate the composition of customs unions, specifically, to estimate the degree to which customs unions match “natural markets” arising from trade flow data or appear to be driven by other factors such as political considerations. This paper expands upon the static approaches used in previous studies to develop a dynamic framework that allows to evaluate not only the composition of customs unions at a given point in time, but also changes in the composition over time resulting from accessions of new member states. We then apply the dynamic algorithm to evaluate the evolution of the global landscape of customs unions using data on bilateral trade flows of 200 countries from 1958 to 2018. A key finding is that there is considerable variation across different accession rounds of the European Union as to the extent to which these are aligned with the structure of “natural markets,” with some accession rounds following more strongly a commercial logic than others. Similar results are also found for other customs unions in the world, complementing the insights obtained from static analyses.
Journal Article
Greening Trade Agreements Through Harmonization of Environmental Regulations
Countries are increasingly using free trade agreements (FTAs) and customs unions (CUs) to cooperate on environmental issues by including environmental provisions in regional trade agreements (RTAs). We examine whether countries form RTAs with regional environmental regulations and join a multilateral trade agreement (MTA) with a common environmental regulation that maximizes world welfare. Each government imposes an environmental tax to mitigate negative externalities caused by the consumption of differentiated goods. The main finding is that a deep FTA with regional harmonization of environmental taxes may act as a stumbling block for an MTA with multilateral harmonization of environmental taxes if the degree of product differentiation is intermediate. In contrast, a deep CU with a regional environmental tax serves as a building block, even if negative consumption externalities are transboundary.
Journal Article
Hope and Despair
Joining the European Union has been a long-lasting priority in Turkish foreign policy and one which has fluctuated from relatively short episodes of hope to longer periods of frustration or even despair. The article reviews the intensity, drivers and justification of change during five critical periods: the 1959 application for association that led to the signature in 1963 of the Treaty of Ankara; the request for full membership in 1987 that led to the signature of the Customs Union in 1995; the Helsinki decision in 1999 to grant Turkey candidate status; the unenthusiastic opening of the accession negotiations in 2005; and the gradual evolution toward a transactional cooperation ever since, which coexists with signs of an increasingly adversarial relationship. Foreign policy changes in Turkey are one of the factors explaining the evolution of this relationship. This article emphasizes the need to take into consideration foreign policy changes in the EU and within some of its member states, as well as global and regional transformations. It also points out the extraordinary resilience of EU-Turkey relations, and how pragmatic, ideational and normative arguments have so far contributed to avoidance of an abrupt divorce.
Journal Article
Eurasian economic integration: impact evaluation using the gravity model and the synthetic control methods
The study examines the impact of Eurasian integration at aggregate country and industry levels using the gravity model of trade and the synthetic control methods. We find that the establishment of the Eurasian Customs Union in 2010 and its further deepening resulted in notable trade creation effects with particularly sizable gains attributed to the commodities and chemicals sectors. The effects on other sectors, including textiles, machinery and transportation, while initially positive and significant, largely dissipated by the year 2015. The analysis also finds that the Eurasian integration, on average, has also facilitated trade with non-bloc trading partners. The results, however, are highly heterogeneous across the members of the bloc. The net impact on trade flows of Eurasian integration was overwhelmingly positive for Belarus, generally positive for Russia and mixed for Kazakhstan.
Journal Article
Symbols and legitimacy in Soviet politics
\"Symbols and legitimacy in Soviet politics analyses the way in which Soviet symbolism and ritual changed from the regime's birth in 1917 to its fall in 1991. Graeme Gill focuses on the symbolism in party policy and leaders' speeches, artwork and political posters, urban redevelopment, and on ritual in the political system. He shows how this symbolism and ritual were worked into a dominant metanarrative which underpinned Soviet political development. Gill also shows how, in each of these spheres, the images changed both over the life of the regime and during particular stages: the Leninist era metanarrative differed from that of the Stalin period, which differed from that of the Khrushchev and Brezhnev periods, which was, in turn, changed significantly under Gorbachev. In charting this development, the book lays bare the dynamics of the Soviet regime and a major reason for its fall\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Revisiting the effect of the EAC customs union on intra-regional trade performance: does it only matter for exports?
Regions worldwide are increasingly establishing customs unions, yet their impact on trade remains uncertain. This study investigates the influence of the East African Community (EAC) customs union on intra-regional trade performance, specifically assessing whether customs unions affect exports, imports, and total trade similarly. Utilizing the gravity equation of intra-regional trade spanning 2002-2021, the analysis indicates that customs unions do not exhibit a significant effect on exports, imports, or total trade. However, a detailed examination reveals varying effects across EAC partner states. While the customs union notably boosts exports in Tanzania and Burundi, it stimulates imports in Uganda, but dampens imports in Kenya. Moreover, the results are sensitive to market size metrics, with differences observed amongst countries. Notably, when market size is gauged by population, the customs union significantly impacts exports in all EAC partner states except Uganda, albeit with variations in the directions of effects. This study endeavors to comprehensively assess regional integration, employing diverse trade measurement approaches. The findings underscore a heterogeneous trade effect of customs unions, suggesting that generalized analyses may offer limited, and potentially misleading, insights into trade policy effects.
Journal Article