When the Cold War ended, many non-democratic regimes across the globe embarked on a course of controlled political liberalization, hoping to stabilize their autocratic rule by mitigating popular ...demands for democratization and increasing regime legitimacy. But does this strategy actually work? This article uses multi-level analyses to examine how the degree of political liberalization affects regime support in non-democratic political systems and to ascertain which mechanisms underlie this effect. Drawing on aggregate measures of political liberalization and comparative survey data from four regional survey projects and 31 non-democracies, the study’s results indicate that the degree of liberalization has no decisively positive effect on regime support, suggesting controlled political liberalization might not be an effective legitimizing strategy after all.
There are close links between air transport and international tourism. The latter, in a significant way has an impact on the development and stimulation of changes in aviation and, in particular, ...this applies to establishing new routes or increasing competition by the emergence of new air carriers. The essence of aviation is manifested in the aviation business travel and learning about the new States. Therefore, a change that has been made in aviation in the second half of the 20th century is a breakthrough. It is about a liberalization of this sector, which has enabled the development of international tourism. There are plenty of benefits for the development of tourism coming from the liberalization of aviation sector. Thanks to competitive prices and continually increasing offer of air connections to various places in the world, demand for tourism is growing trend. Among the factors hampering the development of aviation tourism, the following should be included: maintaining the visa requirement for many countries, the threat of terrorist attacks, a set of factors in the structure of tourism and safety issue. When it comes to Europe, along with the implementation of the common policy of the European Union, the sector of the tourism industry started to develop. Eliminating internal barriers and the gradual implementation of the freedom of movement of persons, services and capital has led to an increase in the demand for tourism in the EU. Europe is an attractive tourist destination in the world.
We study the evolution of trade liberalization's effects on Brazilian local labor markets. Regions facing larger tariff cuts experienced prolonged declines informal sector employment and earnings ...relative to other regions. The impact of tariff changes on regional earnings 20 years after liberalization was three times the effect after 10 years. These increasing effects on regional earnings are inconsistent with conventional spatial equilibrium models, which predict declining effects due to spatial arbitrage. We investigate potential mechanisms, finding empirical support for a mechanism involving imperfect interregional labor mobility and dynamics in labor demand, driven by slow capital adjustment and agglomeration economies. This mechanism gradually amplifies the effects of liberalization, explaining the slow adjustment path of regional earnings and quantitatively accounting for the magnitude of the long-run effects.
While there is considerable empirical evidence on the impact of liberalizing trade in goods, the effects of services liberalization have not been empirically established. This study examines the link ...between services sector reforms and the productivity of manufacturing industries relying on services inputs. Several aspects of services liberalization are considered, namely, the presence of foreign providers, privatization and the level of competition. The results, based on firm-level data from the Czech Republic, show a positive relationship between services sector reform and the performance of domestic firms in downstream manufacturing sectors. Allowing foreign entry into services industries appears to be the key channel through which services liberalization contributes to improved performance of manufacturing sectors. This finding is supported by evidence that foreign acquisitions of Czech services providers result in profound changes in the labor productivity and sales of acquired firms. As most barriers to foreign investment today are not in goods but in services sectors, the findings of this study may strengthen the argument for reform in this area.
We investigate whether financial openness leads to financial development after controlling for the level of legal development using a panel encompassing 108 countries over the period 1980 to 2000. We ...also examine the issue of the optimal sequence of liberalization in both goods and financial markets. Our findings suggest that a higher level of financial openness spurs equity market development only if a threshold level of legal development has been attained. On the issue of sequencing, we find that trade openness is a prerequisite for capital account liberalization while banking system development is a precondition for equity market development.
We investigate the effect of stock market liberalization on technological innovation. Using a sample of 20 economies that experience stock market liberalization, we find that these economies exhibit ...a higher level of innovation output after liberalization and that this effect is disproportionately stronger in more innovative industries. The relaxation of financial constraints, enhanced risk sharing between domestic and foreign investors, and improved corporate governance are three plausible channels that allow stock market liberalization to promote innovation. Finally, we show that technological innovation is a mechanism through which stock market liberalization affects productivity growth and therefore economic growth. Our paper provides new insights into the real effects of stock market liberalization on productivity growth and the economy.
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