Conference Program

Economic integration raises the challenge of coordinating the management of different aspects of cooperation between states. The analysis will aim to try to answer the question of whether, within the EU, states manage to cooperate in such a way as to achieve stable, even economic growth. The analysis will use Immanuel Wallerstein's center-periphery theory, which shows that countries in the center develop faster than their periphery, or that countries in the center develop at the expense of their periphery. The study will examine inter-group differences between the EU's central and periphery countries (ANOVA method) regarding economic development, innovation, and competitiveness.

The paper aims to analyze the importance of interregionalism in the trade policy of the European Union. Using WTO data contained in the Regional Trade Agreements Database covering trade agreements notified to the WTO, an assessment of the scale of this phenomenon and classification of agreements of this type concluded by the EU will be made.

Russia can effectively react to the changes in trade-economic partners and replace the Western countries. Paradoxically, it is due to the stateness of Russia. The Eurasian geopolitical shift in foreign policy reflects the domestic conditions such as ideological and economic. The author using the theory of sanctions and Foreign Policy Analysis will deal with the problem of how authoritarian states adapt to the international environment, limit economic losses, and generate new sources to wage war. Economic structures create conditions for states' foreign policy scenarios as Cameron Thies & Wehner 2019 claim. But the big question is how in political economy authoritarian regimes interpret material aspects of reality and mobilize the national economy and society (Abdelal 2009) gathering people around the flag. Russian case shows that authoritarian leaders may profit from sanctions finding the justification for political control over the economy and shifts in international cooperation. Connolly (2016, 2018) states that research on the effectiveness of sanctions should examine first the ‘direct’ impact on the targeted sectors of the economy; then the less obvious ‘indirect’ impact on the functioning of the wider economy like the problem of redistribution of rent or building the besieged fortress syndrome also in economic aspects.

The objective of this paper is to present and analyse the inequality nexus in South Africa from the dependency theory perspective. Traditionally, the metropolis - periphery framework has been used to depict dependence at the international level. In this article, the author extends and adapts this analytical framework to a local (within-country) context to investigates to what extent …….

First, the article presents a narrative of income inequality in contemporary South Africa. It presents how the unequal distribution of income and wealth has been established and what type of consequences it results in. The narrative is fashioned around the historical injustices of apartheid and its contemporary legacies. Secondly, to give the narrative a stronger logical scaffolding, the author established theoretical and analytical frameworks. Drawing from different strands of the dependency school, following variables are investigated: institutions, ownership of capital, ownership of labour, power structures and endowments of resources. Although the phenomenon of inequality is multidimensional, this article is focused purely on economic inequality (income and wealth) as those – to a great extent – underpin other spheres of inequality. Finally, the framework is applied to the dynamics of the income and wealth distribution in today’s South Africa with an attempt to identify the most important determinants of inequality and its reproduction from the dependency theory perspective.