Abstract
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The socio-economic effects of public reforms in the old and new member states of EU: A comparative research, 1990-2012
During their transition from socialism to a market economy, the post-socialist countries in Central and East Europe [CEE] received assistance from the EU older EU democracies and from the USA. The major objectives of western aid to CEE were to secure the development towards democracy and socio-economic development towards a market economy (Sobis 2002, Sobis & de Vries 2009). However, one can ask a question whether it were only the post-socialist countries that experienced transition. The answer is a clear “no”. The old democracies have also experienced transition when following the idea of NPM and pursuing basic values such as (according to the home page of EU) “human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights” (http://europa.eu/about-eu/basic-information/index_en.htm).
Nowadays, many of the EU member states experience a deep socio-economic crisis, indicated by growing unemployment, social discontent in many spheres like e.g., education, social security, health care, elderly care, low incomes, increased inequality in income between men and women, decreasing pensions and the increasing age at which one is entitled to a pension. Whereas one expected that all EU –member-states would witness progress and that each and every member would profit from its membership, in reality there seems to be at least some variance between member-states.
However, in a comparative perspective we know rather little about the areas in which improvements were seen and areas in which decline is observed, nor about the question how the socio-economic developments must be interpreted and how these socio-economic changes influence the future of the common Europe.
This paper will contain a comparative research between the old democracies in the EU and the new democracies, which became EU member since 2004. The basic difference between these countries is often said to be the maturity of their institutions guaranteeing good governance. One of the main questions is whether this institutionalization of governance is determinative or whether actual socio-economic policies or even other factors are dominant in explaining economic progress and decline.
We will compare economic grow respective decline and the social development following the economic changes taking inspiration from previous research anchored in modernization theory e.g., Lipset (1959), Rostow (1960), McClelland (1967) and some other studies to identify the crucial variables, which are said to contribute to the socio-economic improvement/decline in these countries and compare the impact thereof with the impact of changes in governance.
Our research is based on the national statistics of the chosen countries, data from OECD, Eurostat, Human Developments Reports, World Bank and other relevant sources that allow us to compare the socio-economic indicators of development in order to describe and explain improvements respective declines since 1990 to nowadays within the chosen EU states.
The paper will be structured as follows. Section 1 introduces into the research problem. In section 2 we will address previous research and our hypotheses. In section 3, the methods are reflected upon and in section 4 we focus on data-analysis. In section 6 we answer the research question and draw conclusions.
Key words: socio-economic development, modernization, improvement, decline, EU, NPM
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