On November 30th, Alf Vanags and Anna Zasova participated in “EU funds Conference on mid-term evaluation results”, organized by the Ministry of Finance. They presented results of macroeconomic assessment of the impact of the EU funds and discussed the potential of using macroeconometric modeling as a tool for future fund planning.

www.freepolicybriefs.org - The Forum for Research on Eastern Europe and Emerging Economies (FREE) is a joint initiative by SITE (Stockholm),  BEROC (Minsk), BICEPS (Riga), CEFIR (Moscow), CenEA (Szczecin), ISET (Tblisi) and KEI (Kiev). Together, these research institutes form an extensive network of leading academic experts on economic issues in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The institutes also conduct research about development, emerging markets, as well as economics in general.
The FREE Policy Brief Series is designed to provide short and informative analyses on current economic policy challenges. The focus will be on Eastern Europe and emerging markets. The writings will be based on academic research papers or policy work by the researchers at the different institutes and updated on a weekly basis. The ambition is to bridge the gap between ongoing academic research and policy making, to stimulate and contribute to the international debate as well as to intensify the interaction and discussion with other researchers, policy-makers, and business representatives across the world.

On December 13 Olga Rastrigina and Anna Zasova presented an overview of microsimulation tax-benefit model EUROMOD at the Ministry of Welfare of Latvia. Olga and Anna are members of the Latvian EUROMOD national team and in their presentation they talked about the progress in creating the EUROMOD for Latvia, as well as about perspective model applications.

The Baltic survey included 9 000 interviews carried out from April-June 2010 in all Baltic Sea countries. In Latvia the project was coordinated by the Baltic International Centre for Economic Policy Studies (BICEPS), a research partner of the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga.According to the survey, about 87 % of the adult population of Latvia has visited the Baltic Sea for recreational purposes at least once. About half of these people have visited the sea during the last year. A similar situation has been observed in Estonia and Lithuania, while in Sweden and Denmark being at the Baltic Sea is slightly more popular.Those Latvians who visited the Baltic Sea during the last year, on average, spend about 14 days at the sea during the summer season, and only about 3 days in the winter time. The most popular activities of Latvians are being at the beach for walking, sunbathing, and swimming. Boating, windsurfing, diving, and fishing are much rarer.The residents of Latvia evaluate the status of the Baltic Sea environment as average. They also have not noticed any particular improvement or deterioration in the marine environment during the last 10 years. Based on respondents’ opinions, the most important problems of the Baltic Sea are litter, damage to marine flora and fauna, possibility of an oil spill,  or contamination by heavy metals and other hazardous substances.However, when it comes to actions aimed at improvement of the Baltic Sea environment, the residents of Latvia are very passive. Only 17 % of respondents feel that they can play a role in improving the marine environment, and slightly more than 20 % currently contribute financially to such actions. In contrast, in Sweden more than half of the population does so.Out of all surveyed countries, Latvians together with Lithuanians were the most negative about increasing personal financial contributions to improve the Baltic Sea environment. The only type of contributions that turned out to be acceptable for the majority of the Latvian population was increasing charges on pollution emissions.For further information, please contact:Olga Rastrigina, Research Fellow at the Baltic International Centre for Economic Policy Studies (BICEPS), +371 6 701 5862, olga@biceps.orgAlf Vanags, Director of the Baltic International Centre for Economic Policy Studies (BICEPS), +371 6 703 9317, alf@biceps.orgThe report can be downloaded at:http://www.stockholmresilience.org/balticstern

Alf Vanags and Morten Hansen participated in  this year’s Baltic Development Forum Summit held in Vilnius on June 1-2.  They are contributors to the 2010 State of the Region Report entitled Top of Europe Recovering: Regional Lessons from a Global Crisis. A special focus of this year's report, the seventh in the series of annual evaluations of competitiveness and cooperation across the region, is the longer-term economic trends in the Baltic Countries and Poland.

Alf Vanags participated in the 4th Europe-Ukraine Forum held in Kiev 26th -28th April.

On 17.06.2009 Alf Vanags and Morten Hansen presented the report BICEPS/SSE Riga ‘Too few locally produced goods on the shelves of Latvian shops: Reality or myth?’. The report concludes, among other things, that Latvian goods are not underrepresented in Latvian shops but that productivity and exports are problems to be addressed. For a full version of the report and the presentation please click here

On 17.09.2008 Morten Hansen and Alf Vanags presented the third annual BICEPS/SSE Riga inflation report at SSE Riga. Kārlis Danēvičs, Head of Credit Department, SEB and Uldis Rutkaste, Deputy Head of Monetary Policy Department and Advisor to the Governor, Bank of Latvia discussed the report.

See the pictures here

Vyacheslav Dombrovsky’s papers “Campaign Contributions and Firm Performance: The ‘Latvian Way’” and “Do Political Connections Matter? Firm-level Evidence from Latvia” are available for download from the Social Science Research Network.

Vyacheslav Dombrovsky has returned to BICEPS and SSERiga after spending the autumn semester of 2007 as a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the Center for Study of Public Choice at George Mason University (USA). He was located at Buchanan House, named after GMU’s James Buchanan who received the 1986 Nobel Prize in economics for ‘his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making’. While at the Center, Vyacheslav continued his investigation of the effects of political connections in Latvia. Picture is attached below.

BICEPS organized a session “Labour Markets, Migration, Entrepreneurship” at the 2nd All China Economics International Conference that took place on December 12-14, 2007 at the Hong Kong City University. The conference was attended by around 400 people from all over the world. The session was chaired by BICEPS Director Alf Vanags and two BICEPS research fellows presented their research there. Olga Rastrigina presented her paper “Family Interactions in the Making of Entrepreneurs in Latvia”, and Zane Cunska presented her paper “Mobility of Student Population: Regional Perspective in Latvia”.

The Latvia 2006 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report was presented Vyacheslav Dombrovsky and Olga Rastrigina on June 19th. The survey showed that Latvia is quite reasonably entrepreneurial as compared with other European countries and that Latvia’s entrepreneurs were reasonably innovative. The report is available in both English and Latvian. You can find the report here.