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INDEX OF AVERAGE REAL WAGES IN BELARUS AND OTHER POST-COMMUNIST COUNTRIES, 1990 ¼ 100. Sources: National Statistical Committee of the Republic of Belarus (2010); Rutkowski (1995); 'TransMONEE', Database of United Nations Children's Fund, 2005, available at: http://www.unicef-icdc.org/resources/transmonee. html, accessed 24 January 2006.
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A peculiar model of post-communist political economy has evolved in Belarus under President Aliaksandr Lukashenka. It features prioritisation of non-entrepreneurial social groups, a strong role for the state, and extensive social security provision. The model appears to be grounded on Lukashenka's understanding of his political powerbase; having no...
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... The apparently positive role of continued state ownership for non-entrepreneurial groups in Belarus can also be discerned from statistics on wages and pensions. Notably, the index of real wage dynamics in Belarus in the first decade of reforms (more recent comparative data are unavailable) exceeded that for all other post-communist countries in almost all years except 1994 (see Figure 4). ...
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... After independence in 1991, Belarus flirted with Washington Consensus political and economic reforms. In 1994, however, Alyaksandr Lukashenka came to power, stopped privatization, subsidized transport and preserved free health and education (Ioffe, 2004), preferring 'a somewhat adjusted Marxist-Leninist ideology' over neo-liberalism which 'can be succinctly defined as an ideology of social injustice, profiteering, and individualism … [and] is … not applicable at all to us, to our people, with our tolerance and mentality' (Lukashenka, cited in Yarashevich (2014Yarashevich ( , p. 1705. ...
... As a result, Belarus has managed to retain a social model that differs significantly from other European transition economies, avoiding largescale privatization and the emergence of private oligarchic centres of power as occurred in other transition economies and ensuring full employment and a high degree of social security for its citizens (Yarashevich, 2014(Yarashevich, , p. 1704. In 2016 State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) accounted for almost 50% of employment, over 60% of output and over 77% of industrial output (International Monetary Fund, 2017b, p. 33). ...
The joint development by Belarus and China of the Great Stone Industrial Park (GSIP) is designed to establish a high-tech industrial zone and an eco-friendly satellite city of Minsk as a key node on the Eurasian Land Bridge linking China with the Eurasian Economic Union and the European Union. The development and organization of the GSIP are explained in the light of a coupling of the strategic goals of the two countries in the context of a new Chinese model of external engagement called an emergent geo-political economic culture. These goals include Belarus' desire to reduce its dependence on Russian gas and oil, upgrade and diversify its economy, strengthen its integration with Eurasia and find new partners, by attracting Chinese and other foreign direct investment in the context of China's Going Out and Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). An analysis of the roles of national leaders Aliaksandr Lukashenka and Xi Jinping and of different stakeholders in the predominantly top-down design, development and governance of the park reveals the way in which a BRI cooperation platform permits the coupling of Chinese and Belarusian interests and strategies in ways through which each side expects to benefit.
... Fortin (2010, 667) has described Belarus as an "archetypical example of inconsistency": in some areas such as taxing capacity it gets top scores, yet offers inadequate protection of property rights and has not implemented infrastructural reforms. Yarashevich (2014) has labelled Belarus's political and social order as "distributional authoritarianism", while Wilson (2016) stresses "the regime is spending on social goods to maintain baseline popularity and keep the level of coercion lower than it would be otherwise". ...
State capacity declines with democratization, yet high state capacity supports the stability of both democracies and autocracies. Ukraine has been a paradigmatic example of capacity decline in democratization and Belarus of an authoritarian regime with high capacity. We set out to discover which aspects of state capacity might contribute to opening or stability. Conceptualizing capacity as containing administrative, informational and public service aspects, we compare the two countries to find that capacity appears to be converging. While recent reforms in Ukraine develop aspects with universalizing effects, some aspects with a stabilizing effect – health care – are still better in Belarus.
... As a result, Belarus remains largely a nonmarket economy (Dabrowski, 2016). Privatization is de facto dependent on presidential consent and state ownership of production means is used to keep unemployment low and wages high, with seemingly disciplined fiscal policies to guarantee a high level of social spending (Yarashevich, 2014(Yarashevich, , p. 1717. ...
This article advances our understanding of differences in hybrid stability by going beyond existing regime typologies that separate the study of political institutions from the study of economic institutions. It combines the work of Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast (NWW) on varieties of social orders with the literature on political and economic regime typologies and dynamics to understand hybrid regimes as Limited Access Orders (LAOs) that differ in the way dominant elites limit access to political and economic resources. Based on a measurement of political and economic access applied to seven post‐Soviet states, the article identifies four types of LAOs. Challenging NWW's claim, it shows that hybrid regimes can combine different degrees of political and economic access to sustain stability. Our typology allows to form theoretical expectations about the kinds of political and/or economic changes that will move different types of LAOs toward more openness or closure.
... (Smok, 2013: 1). Other researchers are kinder to Lukashenka arguing that "(…) the Belarusian political economy model amounts to a kind of welfare state, based on a mixture of inherited Soviet and new market principles in both economic and social spheres" (Yarashevich 2014(Yarashevich : 1704. It is difficult to trace market principles in Belarussian economic regime. ...
... (Smok, 2013: 1). Other researchers are kinder to Lukashenka arguing that "(…) the Belarusian political economy model amounts to a kind of welfare state, based on a mixture of inherited Soviet and new market principles in both economic and social spheres" (Yarashevich 2014(Yarashevich : 1704. It is difficult to trace market principles in Belarussian economic regime. ...
Belarus' economy appears to be stuck in a bad equilibrium and faces gloomy economic prospects. Decent economic growth performance came to a halt in 2009. The reasons for a slowdown and prospects of stagnation are both domestic and external. Externally, Belarus was hit by falling oil prices driving down the size of Russian oil subsidy and contracting exports of manufactures as import demand in Russia and was moving up to more sophisticated products that Belarussian exporters were unable to supply. The declining sophistication of Belarus' exports was the result of unreformed economic system. For Belarus' institutional change clock stopped around 1994-96: the government has followed the band aid approach to economic change. In consequence, its underlying principles have not changed since then and, for that matter, neither has its political system. Russian oil-subsidy combined with preferential access to Russian markets made possible foregoing economic reforms and putting off usually painful economic reforms. Two decades later it left the economy totally unprepared to deal with falling energy prices and shift in import demands. Belarus is between a rock and a hard place: it has to overhaul its economic regime. Russia clearly would favor Belarus' economic turnaround but without political liberalization and possibly without an institutional reform enhancing an overall efficiency of the political and economic system. A possible way out of the quandary is to develop a comprehensive strategy of structural reforms leveraged by the WTO accession process.
This article presents an overview of some of the main findings from our analysis of the Berggruen Governance Index for the 2000–2019 period. It first examines overall governance performance across world regions, singles out general trends and identifies top and bottom performers. It then briefly reviews the comparative governance performance of world powers like the United States, Brazil, China, major European countries, India and Russia as well as other selected countries in the post‐Soviet space. Finally, we address more analytic questions to show the versatility of the index for hypothesis testing and theoretical purposes.
While during ‘old’ or ‘closed’ regionalism, lasting approximately from 1950 to 1980, several regional integration projects practised a common industrial policy, in the period of ‘new’ or ‘open’ regionalism, starting in the late 1980s, market failure correcting horizontal industrial policy started to largely replace selective industrial policy, and many regional integration projects did not officially practise industrial policy at all. Only in the 21st century did industrial policy debates broaden again, and different actors brought industrial policy back on the agenda in Latin American, Eurasian and European regionalism.
My PhD project contributes to the research field of comparative regionalism, by analysing the industrial policy of four contemporary regional integration projects – the ‘Common Market of the South’ (MERCOSUR), the ‘Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America – Peoples' Trade Treaty’ (ALBA-TCP), the ‘Eurasian Economic Union’ (EAEU) and the ‘European Union’ (EU) – in their specific historical and politico-economic contexts and by subsequently comparing (i) the programmes, (ii) the implementation results, (iii) the driving actors and institutional arrangements, (iv) the variegated effects caused within the respective integration projects, and
(v) by outlining the specific challenges of (semi-)peripheral integration projects. The main body of the introduction concludes with a theoretical and methodological reflection.
The four papers comprising the paper-based dissertation draw on and partly combine different theoretical perspectives – regional (economic) integration theories, regulation school, neo-Gramscian and materialist state theory, and theories on uneven development and dependency – to shed light on how (intergovernmental or supranational) industrial policy sought to influence the complex dynamics of uneven and dependent development and who were the supporting and inhibiting actors in these processes.
In the conclusion to the introduction, I discuss whether the presented evidence indicates that we have witnessed a shift from trade-centred to development-centred regionalism, formulate some general and region-specific recommendations for joint industrial policy design and implementation, and identify persisting gaps for a future research agenda.
This article examines the issue of democratic breakthroughs in highly geopoliticized, fractured regions in the post-Soviet space. While recognizing the political challenges of democratic transitions in such regions, it investigates specific conditions conducive to effective democratic openings in such regions. Using a case study method, it focuses on Armenia’s Velvet Revolution in 2018, which successfully challenged the previously-entrenched authoritarian regime in the country. This was particularly significant as it occurred in Russia’s security orbit. Armenia has been firmly wedged in Russia-centric regional organizations, in parallel to the deep bilateral ties between the two countries developed since the Soviet collapse. This article argues, first, that the efficacy of nonviolent civil disobedience campaign played a key role in ushering a peaceful democratic breakthrough. This strategy is also credited for explaining Russian restraint as the events unfolded throughout the year. Second, it also highlights the specific form of Armenia’s authoritarianism and the institutionalization of the state that it had produced. It posits an autocrat’s dilemma: greater state institutionalization to defend the “soft” authoritarian system at some point becomes a liability. This dual-track approach to the study of Armenia’s Velvet Revolution, the civil society and the state, is also used to explain Russian restraint as a factor in this case. The article concludes with a brief application of this dual-track transition model to the unyielding mass protests in Belarus, also occurring in Russia’s security orbit.
For more than two decades a key pillar of regime stability in Belarus was legitimation through economic stability and security, prompting experts to speak of a “social contract” between the state and its citizens. The 2020 protests, however, convey significant dissatisfaction with the Lukashenka regime across a broad social and generational base. By comparing survey data from late 2020 with data from 2011 and 2018, we examine changing attitudes towards democracy and state involvement in economic affairs. We find a departure from paternalist values, implying an erosion of the
value base for the previous social contract. Belarusian society has become more supportive of liberal political and economic values. This trend is particularly driven by the older generation and does not exclude Lukashenka’s support base. Meanwhile, attitudes towards democracy and the market have implications for people’s social and institutional trust, preference for democracy, and political participation.
This is the original, accepted version of the paper prior to editing. The final version of the article is published in the journal Communist and Post-Communist Studies, volume 54, issue 4. Please access the published version and cite it as such.
Abstract:
In competitive authoritarian systems, aspiring autocrats must win elections and marginalize the political opposition. In Belarus, President Alexander Lukashenko's strategy for political hegemony heavily relied on socioeconomic co-optation, offering privileges to supporters and imposing sanctions on dissenters. In an economy dominated by the state, co-optation had a coercive effect on behavior. Without sizable areas of activity autonomous from the government, citizens could not defy or mitigate the cost of reprisals for openly supporting the political opposition. Through co-optation, Lukashenko weakened the opposition and built an authoritarian regime without resorting to extensive political violence, which could have undermined his claim of public legitimacy.
