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Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to disclose and explain disparities of social and economic development of twenty-eight postcommunist countries based on the World Bank’s macroeconomic indicators of the selected countries in 2000-2014. The paper questions whether post-communist countries are homogeneous within certain groupings and essentially different across different groupings. The differences are defined in accordance with World Development Indicators. Methods. We have applied cluster analysis to classify post-communist countries based on the long-term average of macroeconomic indicators including: GDP per capita, GDP per capita growth, Foreign direct investment net inflows (percentage of GDP), Agriculture value added (percentage of GDP), Industry value added (percentage of GDP), Total natural resources rents (percentage of GDP), and Value added (percentage of GDP), etc. The Kruskal-Wallis rank test procedure has been used to verify differences between clusters of evidence. Results. Taking into consideration the results obtained via Ward’s method we divided post-communist countries into three relatively homogeneous clusters. Cluster 1 consisted of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyz Republic, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan although Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan were assigned to Cluster 2 in the period of 2010-2014. Cluster 2 included Albania, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, FYR of Macedonia, Romania, the Russian Federation, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The third cluster comprised Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovak Republic. The Kruskal-Wallis rank test indicates statistically significant cluster differences (0.05 level of significance) for GDP per capita, GDP per capita growth, Inflation GDP deflator, Agriculture value added, Total natural resources rents, Services etc. value added. The only exception is GDP per capita growth, which has not been significantly different in 2000-2004. The conclusions are based on p-values, which have been compared with values appropriate to the level of significance ( = 0.05). Conclusions Although all countries in our research were post-communist countries, their economic trajectory after communism was far from being identical. We have found fairly consistent evidence that post-communist countries differ with respect to their social and economic dynamics and can be grouped into three relatively homogeneous clusters.
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The study examines the revival of the management science in Czechoslovakia after 1956 and its activities in the context of political reforms of the 1968. The second part of the article monitors changes of the theory of management since 1968, focusing on the introduction of social planning and its relation to corporate management. The theory of management is presented as an expert activity which was influencing then existing concepts and ideas of the organization of economic life, from the development of complex planning and management systems to efforts aimed at establishing the profession of a socialist manager. The author’s goal is to describe the scope of the expert activity referred to above and also to analyze its political functions in different stages of the development of state socialism. He claims the attempt to create a management science consistent with specific feature of socialist economy led to different concepts and perceptions of methods and objectives of economic management, including different concepts of socialist managership. The reform policy of the 1960s permitted a vast reception of Western management science, development of an institutional base, and creation of an expert culture drawing from a number of different professional disciplines, from psychology to system engineering. The reform management science was promoting socialist entrepreneurship; the idea required economic decentralization and the creation of a system based on an interaction between the plan and the market. The “consolidated” management science of the 1970s responded to a departure from the market socialism and a return to a central planning system by producing a different concept of socialist managership. The manager’s mission was to ensure a level of economic and organizational efficiency comparable to that of a capitalist enterprise and, at the same time, implement socio-political strategies of the socialist regime through social planning.
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The reviewer introduces the book written by the recently deceased historian Jan Křen (1930–2020) and titled "A quarter of a century in Central Europe: The Visegrád countries in a global story of the 1992–2017 period" (Prague: Univerzita Karlova – Karolinum, 2019) as a chronological continuation of his impressive work "Two Centuries of Central Europe" (Dvě století střední Evropy. Prague: Argo, 2005). In his opinion, the work should be read not only as a historical account of Central European system transformations and consolidations after the fall of Communist regimes, but also, to some extent, as the author’s subjectively coloured ego-histoire. The author methodologically draws from institutional economy which works with a principle of path dependence, and neoliberalism as the key ideology of the Central European transformation, towards which, however, he is very critical. The work represents the first compact historical synthesis of Central European developments in the last few decades and provides an excellent overview of the formation of new democratic societies and their journey to international structures, in particular the European Union, thanks to its comparative focus on political, social, and economic developments.
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This review essay is published on the occasion of the recent death of the American historical sociologist Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein (1930–2019) and seeks to present, in outline, his ambitious work resulting in a major theory of the evolution of global capitalism. The author therefore looks first into the origin, expansion and structure of the world capitalist system and later examines the way in which Wallerstein explains the persistence or increase of inequalities in this system. In this context, he develops thoughts on Kondratieff waves, but also offers other alternative views on the long economic cycles not explored by Wallerstein. Apart from these long cycles, the study also critically presents the concept of periphery and the related unequal exchange between the global centre and the periphery, or semi-periphery. Finally, the author pays special attention to the late phase of Wallerstein’s scientific career, when his attention shifted to the issue of culture. The review is motivated by the fact that in the Czech environment the extensive work of this prominent historical sociologist has been reflected in a systematic way only by Stanislav Holubec, and apart from this, it has been reflected only marginally. The author presents a detailed critical argument challenging Wallerstein’s general thesis on the increase of global inequalities between the centre and the periphery by showing that different methodological approaches to measuring these inequalities lead to different, or even contradictory, conclusions.
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The inventions and innovations movement in Czechoslovakia, which developed here on a massive scale with state support after the communist coup of 1948, has so far received little attention in historical research. The study examines how this movement was reflected and publicized on the pages of the Inventor and Innovator (Vynálezce a zlepšovatel) journal, which was published from 1969 to 1990 by the Czechoslovak Scientific and Technical Society (until 1989). The authors focus principally on three levels: firstly, the normative definition of inventions and innovations in the legislation during the period of state socialism and its institutional anchorage; secondly, the creation of the image of an ideal inventor and innovator on the pages of the journal; and, thirdly, the changing emphasis in the presentation of this movement and its subordination to economic efficiency. They also pay attention to the criticism of the administrative obstacles faced by the movement during this period, its insufficient results and the lack of coordination within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. By analysing the content of the journal, the authors show how the inventions and innovations movement was supported as part of the scientific and technical revolution and economic rationalization, and how it was defined, on the one hand by the claims arising from socialist moral economy, and on the other by economic pragmatism. Where as the first view subordinated individual ambitions and performance to the obligations towards society in general and made the innovators movement a moral obligation of all workers, the second perspective was primarily about the contribution of the inventions and innovations proposals to economic savings, innovations and, preferably, patents and licenses which could be used in the export of products and technologies as a source of foreign currency. In this respect, individual motives of economic profit were fully accepted, and the journal also provided guidance to inventors and innovators on how to exercise their right to just reward, even in legal disputes with industrial enterprises as employers. As is evident from the published articles, the trend went from the moral concept of the early 1970s to the economic emphasis of the 1980s, especially in the period of perestroika, with inspiration also sought in the management approaches of the “crises years” of 1967–1969. The authors come to the conclusion that some of the inventors and innovators started using this activity as a long-time source of additional income, turning it into “a small socialist business” (drobné socialistické podnikání) within the law. This created conditions for a fairly smooth transition to the capitalist economy in the 1990s, and the inventions and innovations movement therefore became one of the sources of transformation continuity in Czechoslovakia before and after 1989.
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The book "Austerities and Aspirations: A Comparative History of Growth. Consumption, and Quality of Life in East Central Europe Since 1945" (Budapest, Central European University Press 2020), written by the Hungarian historian Béla Tomka, provides a “triple approach” to economic development in East-Central Europe (Poland, Czechoslovakia and its successor states, and Hungary). Aiming to go beyond the perspective of economic growth alone, Tomka considers economic growth along with consumption and quality of life. Taking a comparative perspective, he assesses convergences and divergences between East-Central Europe and Western Europe. In the reviewer’s opinion, the book is a useful comparative study of various economic developments in the region, but Tomka remains rather implicit about his value judgement behind choosing certain economic indicators and does not engagewith more critical approaches to economic growth.
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În materialul de faţă vom introduce noţiunea de fractură pentru a înţelege mai bine caracterul sincopat al evoluţiei Europei de Est, cel puţin din perspectiva societăţii româneşti. În mod normal, istoria se derulează în cicluri („ansambluri de mişcări pe durate lungi care însufleţesc o societate”) şi în serii (înlănţuire de fenomene diferite dar cu o cauzalitate comună). Şi întrun caz şi în celălalt, modernităţile pot coexista ca şi alegeri „obiective”, rezultante ale confluenţei dintre procesele interne şi contextul extern al societăţilor particulare. Fracturile apar atunci când societăţile nu-şi pot duce până la capăt ciclul sau seria istorică din cauza unor distorsiuni temporale majore, rezultat al unei agresiuni externe.
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The aim of the article is to construct a certain thought experiment using Gabriel Tarde’s concept of neo-monadism to rethink the foundations of liberal oikodicy. In this article, liberal oicodicy is understood as the concept of a social order based on the idea of a rational, autonomous individual (homo-oeconomicus) operating in the conditions of economic exchange (Vogl 2015). The recapitulation of the Leibnizian concept of monadism proposed by Tarde in the light of contemporary knowledge and its application to the social world allows us to state that such a model of subjectivity is insufficient to explain many – seemingly irrational – phenomena, such as populist (mass) movements or financial speculations, characteristic of the political economy of the 21st century.
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The article investigates the financial situation of the workers and employees of the Imandra railway station during the Russian Civil War and the intervention on Murman. The key research questions are: what legal acts established the workers’ wages, and how these wages correlated with the general socio-economic situation of the inhabitants of the Northern Oblast. The main sources of research are archival materials containing information on the salaries of employees who held various positions, reports on the average wages of women and men, and the minutes of meetings of officials discussing the economic problems on the Murman. Archival data on the life of workers at the Imandra depot are used for the first time. It is concluded that at the Imandra station there was a significant gender inequality in terms of wages, with the average wage of men being almost twice the average wage of women. Nevertheless, despite all the difficulties, the station workers had access to the free purchase of consumer goods, although the prices for these goods were relatively high. It is concluded that one of the main problems of the Northern Oblast population was the rapid inflation of the ruble that resulted in higher prices, while wages could not match them.
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Far this paper, data (unpublished and published historical sources, relevant literature, official papers, press, periodicals, etc.) were researched and presented in the content, which speaks about the characteristics and some features of economic and social „ development" of Bosnia and Herzegovina during monarchist Yugoslavia. Understanding and knowing this issue can help to understand the disproportion of unequal development of certain parts of the farmer common stale, the attitude of central authorities towards Bosnia and Herzegovina, the causes that led to the disproportion, and monitoring the process of transformation of Bosnian society from agrarian to industrial at the transition from 19th to 20th century in monarchist Yugoslavia, and, especially, during the post - war reconstruction and the first five - year plan. That is, verified data are offered on the basis of which one can follow such a complex process far which it was necessary to consult a significant number of archival documents. Most space was given to comparing economic development and highlighting the social characteristics of Bosnia and Herzegovina with other provinces that were part of monarchist Yugoslavia. The facts show that one of the basic features of the industry of the farmer Yugoslavia was that there was a big difference in the level of development of certain of its parts. While the branches of light industry, especially food and textile, were relatively developed, some branches almost did not exist, or were very poorly developed: oil production, electrical industry, metallurgy, machinery, energy and others. The difference was evident in the level of development in some provinces of the farmer Yugoslavia. The western and northern parts (Slovenia, Croatia, Vojvodina) were significantly more industrially developed than the eastern and central parts (Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina). Thus, far example, Slovenia entered Yugoslavia with 1.325 million dinars of capital invested in industry per 1,000 inhabitants, Croatia with Slavonia and Dalmatia with 0.727 million, Serbia with 0. 594 million, etc. In relation to the number of inhabitants, the highest industry was built in Slovenia, and the least next to Montenegro in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In the period from 1918. to 1938, a total of 2, 193 industrial and processing companies were built in Yugoslavia. OF that, 403 companies in Slovenia or 18.4%, although it accounts far 8.2% of the total population; in Croatia 635 companies or 29%, and its share in the population was 24. 1 %; in Bosnia and Herzegovina 129 companies or 5.88%, although its share in the total population of Yugoslavia was 16.7%. Another important feature of Yugoslav industry between the two world wars was the technical backwardness of those branches that were more or less developed. Old and worn-out machines were procured from industrialized countries, which were thrown out of the production process there. The third characteristic was the irrational placement of companies away from raw materials, roads and markets. Factories were built regardless of the raw material base, but the profit was mostly taken into account and was the driving force. A further characteristic is related to the fact that in almost all industries it was present, and in the largest and technically most modern companies, the dominant foreign capital. It forced the export of ore, wood and other raw materials and imported finished products at expensive prices. The content presented here provides relevant information on some, significant (key) events that were crucial far answering the research question.
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The article attempts to define the role of Plovdiv International Fair in the foreign trade relations of Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia – countries belonging to the same economic and political world in the inter-bloc confrontation during the Cold War. The period from the mid-1940s and the 1950s was chosen, because then Czechoslovakia was the second most important trade socialist partner of Bulgaria, which provided machinery, equipment and complete sites for Bulgarian industrialization. The study traces the gradual weakening of the importance of the fair for their trade relations with the increase of integration processes in the COMECON since 1956, when the international socialist division of labour was created and the processes of coordinating business plans were centralized. The analysis is based on archival material not yet in scientific circulation, stored in the State Archives of Plovdiv, and on studies examining the Bulgarian-Czechoslovak economic relations for the period.
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Croatia was economically and demographically more successful during the period from 1946 — 90 than after the independence. The article investigates the causes of such a situation as well as the theoretical consequences of the case study of the Republic of Croatia. The article explains the causes of the very rapid economic development of the Socialist Republic of Croatia until 1980. However, during the last ten years of the socialist system and communist dictatorship, an economic crisis broke out. This crisis contributed (along with foreign policy circumstances) to the collapse of that system, to the introduction of democracy and capitalism, and to the collapse of former Yugoslavia. Yet, the new system did not meet its expectations. The Republic of Croatia achieved very modest economic results after independence, with a significant decline in population. Although the war contributed to this situation, the post-war results show that the wrong economic policy is the main cause of this failure. The impact of privatization was particularly negative. Theoretically, the case study of Croatia does not confirm the dominant theories about the advantages of democracy over dictatorship, capitalism over socialism or theories that emphasize the advantages of national homogeneity for economic development but it confirms the theories about the influence of economy on democratic transition.
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The article discusses the Esmahan Sultan Mosque in connection to the tombstone inscriptions from the building’s courtyard. Using as a starting point a summary table with the names and details of the deceased, the authors will refer to the demographic situation of the city during the 17th – 19th centuries, highlighting the consequences of the Russian-Turkish conflicts of the 19th century on the evolution of the population. As a historical source, there will be presented Ottoman maps used during the 19th century, showing the city of Mangalia and the main roads in the area of southern Dobrudja. The paper ends with the presentation of the plan and brief description of the oldest house in Mangalia, owned by the merchant Mehmet Hagi Ismail at the end of the 18th century.
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The article is devoted to some discussion problems related to the characterization of ius emphyteuticarium, which appears to be too specific (sui generis) and different from the traditionally defined real law and law of obligation. For this reason, in the constitution of the emperor Zeno (CJ.4.66.1), from which the fragment that served as the title of the article, this right is called ius tertium. However, it is not an innovation in the post-classical period, but is the result of the development of the Roman legal concept of public property and its management since the archaic period, it has its design in the so-called duplex dominium during the time of the Republic and the Principate and passed into medieval law in the system of divided ownership (dominium divisum).
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The geographic distance between Romania and Sweden influenced the creation of mutual imaginary. However, it wasn't until the beginning of the 20th century that inhabitants of the two nations were interested in discovering each other. Therefore, Romanian-Swedish mutual impressions were mostly based on the accounts of tourists who had visited both nations. During the interwar era, direct contact between Romanians and Swedes was infrequent. The news about Romania was disseminated by the Swedish press, which played a significant part in the formation of hostile sentiments. On the other side, the Romanian diplomats who ran the Stockholm-based Legation had nothing but admiration for Swedish society. During the Second World War, the situation improved as more Romanian and Swedish intellectuals traveled to Scandinavia and the Balkans. However, these interactions did not alter how Romanians and Swedes viewed one another.
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The article aims to reveal the mechanisms of the war of the institutions during the government of Philip Dimitrov (November 8, 1991 – December 30, 1992), emphasizing its manifestation in the form of arms affairs. For this purpose, the Historical and Legal Method is used. It is established that during the short life of the cabinet, several arms scandals broke out, as the last one, the Weapons for Macedonia affair, brought the prime minister out of power. It is proven that arms affairs become the main means of fighting between political opponents during the period under review, because they easily caused a media storm, ruined the reputation of politicians, were difficult to refute and for a long time imposed in the public consciousness the suspicion of corruption towards the persons involved in them. For the first time, the causes of the war of institutions and its course are examined and analyzed in detail.
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Infrastructure is one of the main parts of football industry in contemporary time. Pitches, stadiums, sporting goods stores, museums of different teams and clubs are very important now. These facilities began to appear in Central-Eastern Europe at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. The aim of this research is the comparison of knowledge transfer process about football infrastructure in Kharkiv and Sofia. This article shows participants and ways to disseminate knowledge about football infrastructure, location of football pitches and stadiums in two non-port cities. It also illustrates the importance of local educational institutions and businesses in disseminating such information. More generally, the comparison provides insight into the influence of the administrative status of the city and the level of its industrialization on the speed and the scale of the implementation of knowledge in practice.
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