Volume 55 (2019): Issue 3 (September 2019)

A neglected aspect of regional trade agreements (RTAs) is their protectionist potential. In times of a stagnating World Trade Organization (WTO), growing economic nationalism and skepticism about the merits of free trade and trade agreements, the paper examines to what extent recently signed RTAs really promote genuine free trade or rather foster sneaky protectionism under the guise of free trade. For this, the paper proposes an ideal-type free trade agreement benchmark model based on a classical liberal perspective and applies it in a multiple case study approach to assess three cases of recently concluded mega-RTAs: the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), the renegotiated North American trade agreement USCMA, and the Canada–European Union (EU) agreement CETA. The article shows that all of them are far from the classical liberal ideal of totally free trade and have a high content of back door protectionism suitable to raise trade barriers when politically opportune. In particular, the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA) includes many clear protectionist provisions that might even outweigh its liberalizing stipulations, whereas CPTPP and CETA can be deemed net liberalizing. It concludes that given political economy constraints, RTAs can nevertheless remain a second-best solution to the classical liberal ideals of completely unhampered trade and unilateral liberalization provided that they remove more impediments to free exchange than they cement or create.

This article addresses Japan’s economy, its new economic policy package, which is known as Abenomics. The centerpiece of Abenomics has been the three “economic arrows” targeted at aggressive monetary policy, flexible fiscal policy, and growth strategy. This article focuses on Abenomics and shows the measures undertaken by the administration. The research question is: to what extent the policy package contributes to stimulating the economy? This question relates to the main problem of the effectiveness of Abenomics. The main purpose of this article is an attempt to evaluate Abenomics from the perspective of 5 years since the time of its announcement.

This article explores Bruno Amable’s Diversity of Capitalism approach to analyze educational systems in the European Union (EU28). The main goal is to identify the main clusters of educational systems with regard to their institutional characteristics. Second goal of the analysis is to evaluate the impact of several EU policies and initiatives on the institutional structure of European educational systems. This article identified six clusters in terms of general education and five clusters in terms of higher education systems. The clustering shows, that – with some exceptions (notably the United Kingdom and Ireland) – European education systems have similar structure to other institutional areas, in particular, it confirms the existence of post-communist (in terms of Farkas) or patchwork (in terms of Rapacki et al.) capitalism. The article shows, as well, that subsystem of higher education is much less diverse, what may have a significance for future discussions on the capitalisms in the EU. Results suggests also that there exist significant differences in performance between the clusters, something that may have a crucial importance for an educational policy.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the level of similarity between financial systems in selected Central and Eastern European countries (CEE11) and four models of capitalism in Western Europe identified by B. Amable [The diversity of modern capitalism, 2003]. A comparative analysis in this institutional area was done on the basis of six variables. Three of them represent inputs, that is, institutional determinants, and other three variables describe outputs of institutional regulations. For each of them coefficients of similarity between a CEE11 country and a selected Western European country were calculated, and based on it the similarity hexagons were created. In this paper, two pictures of the institutional arrangements were taken: for 2005 and for 2014. Additionally, an analysis of changes that took place in institutional solutions in the CEE11 countries, based on the variables and the coefficients of similarity, was carried out.

The analyses showed that in the area of financial intermediation, the group of CEE11 countries in 2005 was characterized by the greatest similarity to the Continental model of capitalism. The same investigations carried out for 2014 indicate a significant shift in the analyzed area toward solutions typical of the Mediterranean model.

Since “Belt and Road initiative” (BRI) has been launched, the major volume of academic studies focus on the consideration of Eurasian land and maritime transport routes. Experts on Chinese foreign policy and geopolitical strategy emphasize possible positive and negative aspects of the initiative for the states involved. The business and political circles from Eastern Baltic Sea region are looking for possible ways to attract cargo to its ports. Yet, the possible transformations of Chinese foreign trade flows in the context of BRI are now under academic consideration. We focus on the evaluation of ports’ possibilities to handle Chinese cargo. The key issues of our study include the choice of cargo transportation routes and opportunities to attract Chinese investment to expand port and logistics infrastructure. The methodology of the research is based on statistical data analysis for the further comparison of transport routes. Our empirical results demonstrate that Eastern Baltic Sea ports can attract little part of Chinese trade flows.