Financial Liberalization, Growth, Productivity and Capital Accumulation: The Case of European Integration

In the present contribution, we concentrate on the process of financial liberalization in a specific context of European economic and monetary integration. We implement de facto and de jure measures of financial liberalization and find that formal aspects of financial openness generate a strongly positive impact on economic growth and its sources, productivity growth and capital accumulation. Moreover, there is evidence of a positive contribution to the process stemming from the EU membership, while no substantial effect comes from the euro adoption. Finally, we investigate the effects from financial integration on country groups within the EU

The Strange Case of Yugoslav Feminism: Feminism and Socialism in ‘the East’

The text counters the prevailing idea that there was no feminism in the socialist Eastern bloc, carefully presenting a peculiar case of Yugoslav feminism which grew out of socialist political and cultural framework. Yugoslavia was the country where the organization of the singular feminist event in the Eastern world, the conference “Comrade Woman – The New Approach?” (1978), took place. The text traces the ideas on emancipation and liberation which appeared in Yugoslav scientific and literary journals, immediately after the “Comrade Woman” and until the late 1980s, before the proclaimed fall of the Iron Curtain. The written material is grouped into three sections, according to how the so called woman’s question was elaborated. By re-reading this material, the text examines if feminism was legitimized within the dominant socialist discourse, or whether it was purely translated as something externally Western. The aim of the text is to describe how scholars and activists portrayed emancipation and liberation at that very time: to see if they negotiated or failed to negotiate Western definitions and Eastern realities. In that sense, given material is not used to simply reinforce or refute the claim that feminism was an imported Western (i.e. capitalist) product that had no place interfering with the development. of socialism. It also urges us to re-consider the common knowledges we have, in order to see how they become situated as commo