Ten Years of EU Membership – The Maltese Parliament. Occasional Paper 1/2014

Introduction. The European Union has long seen the use of enlargement as a means to transform its neighbours. For many of the 2004 enlargement countries, membership was a means to open economically and politically. For Malta and Cyprus, established democracies with extensive trade links across Europe, EU membership still had the capacity to transform their political and economic systems and hence the need, a decade on, to take stock. With this in mind and conscious that the EU political system has often raised concerns over legitimacy and accountability, attention is increasingly being focused on how the complexities of the EU political system, and the role national governments play in that system, impacts the legitimacy and accountability of the domestic political system, in particular the functioning of the national parliament. To this end, this paper will analyse how the Maltese Parliament has been impacted by membership and seek to establish whether there has been a significant alteration in its ability to hold the national executive to account.

An economy with unrealistic indicators: an evaluation of the economic situation in Belarus and a forecast for 2013. OSW Commentary No. 103, 2013-02-20

The macroeconomic results achieved by Belarus in 2012 laid bare the weakness and the inefficiency of its economy. Belarus’s GDP and positive trade balance were growing in the first half of last year. However, this trend was reversed when Russia blocked the scheme of extremely lucrative manipulations in the re-export of Russian petroleum products by Belarus and when the demand for potassium fertilisers fell on the global market. It became clear once again that the outdated Belarusian model of a centrally planned economy is unable to generate sustainable growth, and the Belarusian economy needs thorough structural reforms. Nevertheless, President Alyaksandr Lukashenka consistently continues to block any changes in the system and at the same time expects that the economic indicators this year will reach levels far beyond the possibilities of the Belarusian economy. Therefore, there is a risk that the Belarusian government may employ – as they used to do – instruments aimed at artificially stimulating domestic demand, including money creation. This may upset the relative stability of state finances, which the regime managed to achieve last year. The worst case scenario would see a repeat of what happened in 2011, when a serious financial crisis occurred, forcing Minsk to make concessions (including selling the national network of gas pipelines) to Moscow, its only real source of loans. It thus cannot be ruled out that also this time the only way to recover from the slump will be to receive additional loan support and energy subsidies from Russia at the expense of selling further strategic companies to Russian investors.