Open Access

This policy note summarizes our assessment of financial sanctions against Russia. We see an increase in sanctions severity starting from (1) the widely discussed SWIFT exclusions, followed by (2) blocking of correspondent banking relationships with Russian banks, including the Central Bank, alongside secondary sanctions, and (3) a full blacklisting of the ‘real’ export-import flows underlying the financial transactions. We assess option (1) as being less impactful than often believed yet sending a strong signal of EU unity; option (2) as an effective way to isolate the Russian banking system, particularly if secondary sanctions are in place, to avoid workarounds. Option (3) represents possibly the most effective way to apply economic and financial pressure, interrupting trade relationships.

The focus of this contribution is on the mode of capitalism within the industrialized sectors of "emerging markets". Particularly in the context of the rise of the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) this question has gained considerable importance, also for the development of the world economy as a whole. The core question is whether the type of capitalism within these economies is similar to the capitalist variety of the triad, or diverges in more or less permanent ways. The article gives a preliminary answer to this question, by developing a rough sketch of a "BRIC" model of capitalism and illustrating this model with the case of Brazil. In terms of theory, the article extends the Comparative Capitalism (CC) perspective to the BRICs. On the one side, the focus is on the classical questions of CC, i.e. the determinants of economic development and the differences to other types of capitalism, on the other side the relationship between these varieties and social inequality. It argues that the "state-permeated market economies" of the BRICs rely on clans as a mode of social coordination. As demonstrated by the case of Brazil, this type of capitalism can be quite successful, but is based on a highly unequal distribution of economic and political resources.

There have been numerous attempts to reform the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) after the Great Recession, however the reform success varies greatly among sub-fields. Additionally, the political science research community has engaged a diverse set of theory- driven explanations, causal mechanisms, and variables to explain respective reform success. This article takes stock of reform policies in the EMU from two angles. First, it outlines distinct theoretical approaches that seek to explain success and failure of reform proposals and second, it surveys how they explain policy output and policy outcome in four policy subfields: financial stabilization, economic governance, financial solidarity, and cooperative dissolution. Finally, the article develops a set of explanatory factors from the existing literature that will be used for a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA).

Finanzmärkte müssen nicht unbedingt liberal organisiert sein, wie die Situation in großen Schwellenländern zeigt. Dafür gibt es mitunter gute Gründe.

Financial markets do not necessarily have to be organized liberally, as the situation in large emerging markets shows. Sometimes for good reasons.