The governments of Central Asia and the south Caucasus face a kaleidoscope of challenges as they each navigate the transition to modern, independent, and stable states. Most of these problems emanate from internal dynamics within each state that limit their ability to ensure stable and legitimate governments for the population. These are weak states characterized by repressive personalistic rul...

This paper is concerned with the sustainability of free-trade areas. I begin with an FTA that is formed as a political equilibrium and examine conditions under which the FTA is sustainable, i.e., governments do not leave it. The sustainability of the FTA is in°uenced by governments' valuation on political contributions, discount factors, the lobbying position of the speci ̄c-interest group in in...

Concerns have been expressed that in a global market place with mobile capital, national governments will have incentives to set weak environmental policies (“environmental dumping”) to protect the international competitiveness of their domestic firms, that these incentives are particularly strong in industries where plants may be relatively footloose, so that governments are concerned to preve...

In addition, it seems clear that different national governments have pursued different policies toward the preferred level of the real exchange rate. Some countries appear committed to keeping the real value of their currencies Acompetitive@, that is relatively weak (depreciated). Others seem not to be particularly concerned about the impact of their exchange rates on export or import competiti...

We establish several results regarding dividing and forking in NTP2 theories. We show that dividing is the same as array-dividing. Combining it with existence of strictly invariant sequences we deduce that forking satisfies the chain condition over extension bases (namely, the forking ideal is S1, in Hrushovski’s terminology). Using it we prove an independence theorem over extension bases (whic...

Homoclinic bifurcation of 4-dimensional symplectic mappings is asymptotically studied. We construct the 2-dimensional stable and unstable manifolds near the submanifolds which experience exponentially small splitting, and successfully obtain exponentially small oscillating terms in the 2-dimensional manifolds. ∗ E-mail address: [email protected] 1 typeset using PTPTEX.sty <ver...

The Roma are the most populous marginalised community in Europe and have some of the greatest health needs. There is a higher prevalence of communicable and non-communicable diseases within the community and significantly shorter life expectancies than national averages. Efforts by governments across Europe to address these health inequalities have been relatively weak and the Roma suffer poore...

Families of solitons in one- and two-dimensional (1D and 2D) Gross-Pitaevskii equations with the repulsive nonlinearity and a potential of the quasicrystallic type are constructed (in the 2D case, the potential corresponds to a fivefold optical lattice). Stable 1D solitons in the weak potential are explicitly found in three band gaps. These solitons are mobile, and they collide elastically. Man...

This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced the allocation of public expenditures in OECD countries. I analyze two datasets that report different expenditure categories and cover the time periods 1970-1997 and 1990-2006, respectively. The results suggest that government ideology has had a rather weak influence on the composition of governments’ budgets. Leftist governments, h...