Comparative Analysis of Educational Attainment in Transition Economies

The project compared several indicators of educational attainment across various groups of transition economies, and between transition economies and others. The indicators of education reflected both the quantity of schooling (e.g. average years of schooling, percentage not attending school at all, and adult literacy rates) and schooling quality (e.g. public expenditure on education, pupil-teacher ratios, repetition rates, dropout rates, and international test scores). The basic test used in the project was a t-test on differences in sample means. Among the transition economies, the indicators examined were most favourable for central European, high-income and advanced transition countries, although the differences between these countries and the remaining transition countries were not usually statistically significant. When compared with other world economies, the transition countries typically showed significantly better indicators than developing countries, but differences between transition and developed countries were not statistically significant. The project also examined the behaviour of the correlation coefficient between indicators of education and income, which, as expected, were usually positive.

Liberal Nationalism: A Historical and Critical Analysis of Conceptions

At the end of the 20th century we live in a pluralist world in which national and ethnic identities play an appreciable role, sometimes provoking serious conflicts. Nationalist values seem to pose a serious challenge to liberal ones, particularly in the post-communist countries. Malinova asked whether liberalism must necessarily be contrasted with nationalism. Although nationalist issues has never been a major concern for liberal thinkers, in many countries they have had to take such issues into consideration and a form of 'liberalism nationalism' has its place in the history of political ideas. Some of the thinkers who tried to develop such an idea were liberals in the strict sense of the word and others were not, but all of them tried to elaborate a concept of nationalism that respected the rights of individuals and precluded discrimination on ethnic grounds. Malinova studied the history of the conceptualisation of nations and nationalism in the writings, of J.S. Mill, J.E.E. Acton, G. Mazzini, V. Soloviev, B. Chicherin, P. Struve, P. Miljoukov and T.G. Masaryk. Although it cannot be said that these theories form a coherent tradition, certain common elements of the different approaches can be identified. Malinova analysed the way that liberal nationalists interpreted the phenomenon of the nation and its rights in different historical contexts, reviewed the structure of their arguments and tried to evaluate this theoretical experience from the perspective of the contemporary debate on the problems of liberal nationalism and multiculturalism and recent debates on 'the national idea' in Russia.