Foreign capital inflows (FCI) play an important role in the economic development of the recipient country as they fund investments and promote growth. However, the size and composition of such inflows are determined on the basis of country specific requirements. The study investigates the impact of capital inflows on the economy of Kenya at a time when the government implemented economic reform measures to stabilize the economy and restore sustainable growth. More specifically, the study examines the impact of foreign capital flows remittances such as overseas workers remittance, official development aid, and external debt, on selected macro-economic variables using monthly time series data and a single-equation empirical approach. The study findings reveal that some forms of FCI are not influenced by the macro economic variables in the country but by other factors such as political stability and policy variables.

Ever since the 1960s, Sweden has heavily invested in international development cooperation, with a target of devoting 1% of the GNI to the matter. For at least as long, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) has had as part of its mission to inform the Swedish public about global development. This mission has been executed mainly through distribution of funds to civil society organisations (CSOs) who have used them for different communication activities.  At the end of 2022, the new right-wing government of Sweden decided to abandon the 1% target and reduce Sida’s funding for communication about development in Sweden by almost 90%. In this thesis, I investigate what concerns this raises among the CSOs. Data was collected through a questionnaire and interviews with CSO representatives.  The data show that the CSOs raise concerns for the government’s decision leading to less knowledge and interest among Swedes about development issues, which they argue will in turn lead to less support for state spending on international development, a weaker civil society, less transparency and accountability and by extension threaten democracy.

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The region of Southern Appalachia, long known for its colorful storytellers, is also rich in folk medical lore and practice. In their Appalachian novels, Lucy Furman, Emma Bell Miles, Mildred Haun, Catherine Marshall, Harriette Arnow, Lee Smith, and Charles Frazier, feature folk medicine prominently in their narratives. The novels studied, set against the backdrop of the rise of official medicine, are divided into three major time periods that correspond to important chapters in the history of American medicine: the 1890s through the 1930s; the 1940s through the 1960s; and the 1970s through the present. The study of folk medicine, a sub-specialty of the academic discipline of folklore, gains significance with the current rise in distrust of official medicine and a return to medical folkways of our past. The authors studied here have performed an ethnological role in collecting and preserving with great care and authenticity many of the Appalachian regionÆs folk medical beliefs and practices.

In the wake of World War II, development aid became an important staple in alleviating impacted areas through external economic assistance by supporting infrastructure, income distribution, and inequality, and has become a global channel for less developed countries in an attempt to secure sustained development through the possibility of external inflows of resources. A rather crude measure of global foreign aid net flow for 2020 is around $194.1bn (The World Bank, 2022), and yet there is no consensus on how to measure or conceptualise the impact of aid. One of the main branches of foreign aid literature that follow the contemporary debate on aid impact is Moseley’s (1987) “micro-macro paradox” which contradicts the effectiveness of foreign aid. In an attempt to provide further depth to the discussion, this analysis uses a nuanced neoclassical realist framework to explain the interactions between key domestic and international systemic incentives, and their influences on official development aid strategies, in combination with a quantitative regression model to evaluate Swedish foreign aid engagement in Georgia. In conclusion, the micro-results are encouraging and quite clear, and time lags are an important dimension in the aid-growth relation, however, in terms of the larger magnitude of analysis, more expansive data panels are to be recommended to define clear causal links between official development strategies and the impact of aid.

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Yes / Since the 1980s, the digital revolution has been both a negative and positive force. Within a few weeks of the Covid-19 outbreak, lockdown accelerated the adoption of digital solutions at an unprecedented pace, creating unforeseen opportunities for scaling up alternative approaches to social and economic life. But it also brought digital risks and threats that placed new demands on policymakers. This article assembles evidence from different areas of social science expertise about the impacts of Covid-19 in digitised societies and policy responses. The authors show how the pandemic supported changes in data collection techniques and dissemination practices for official statistics, and how seemingly insuperable obstacles to the implementation of e-health treatments were largely overcome. They demonstrate how the ethics of artificial intelligence became a primary concern for government legislation at national and international levels, and how the features enabling smart cities to act as drivers of productivity did not necessarily give them an advantage during the pandemic. At the micro-level, families are shown to have become ‘digital by default’, as children were exposed to online risks and opportunities. Globally, the spread of the pandemic provided a fertile ground for cybercrime, while digital disinformation and influencing risked becoming normalised and domesticated.

This study seeks to illuminate the Swedish propaganda effort during the first years of Swedish participation in the Napoleonic wars, known as the Pomeranian War (1805-1807) in Swedish historiography. This is accomplished by analysing the reporting off the Swedish war effort in the official newspapers Stockholm Post-tidningar and Inrikes tidningar with a model of wartime propaganda previously put forward by Anna Maria Forssberg. The sources used, classified as “official Swedish war reporting”, are the published materials written either explicitly by official Swedish sources or other texts from an entirely Swedish perspective. A classification motivated by the heavy press regulations and state censorship of the late Gustavian era. The study covers the entirety of the period of Franco-Swedish warfare in northern Germany up to and including the evacuation of Swedish forces from Rügen in September 1807 but ends before the formal conclusion of peace in 1810. During this period several other important themes besides the fighting are covered in the official propaganda. These include a conflict with Prussia in 1806 and the Swedish alliances with Russia, Britain and, later, Prussia. The role of the image of the king in the authoritarian Gustavian political system and the way that the propaganda tries to paint a positive picture of Swedish military endeavours, mostly setbacks, with great emphasis on the preservation of military honour is also discussed.

With the rapid growth in the number of new media platforms in China, a large number of Internet users have been turned into citizen journalism accounts. With the digital transformation of official media, many citizen journalism accounts are often pulled into news production by official media to co-produce content. On the Chinese Internet, citizen journalism not only plays the role of challenging and influencing agenda-setting and public opinion, but also takes on the task of propagating ideology and values. This thesis explored this phenomenon of journalistic practice by using generic news frames and propaganda theories as theoretical foundations. Meanwhile, this study used mainly quantitative content analysis as research method, exploring the characteristics of news videos produced by Chinese citizen journalism accounts in collaboration with official media, and what propaganda techniques were used to help legitimize authoritarian rule. This study examined 432 collaborative videos on bilibili published by CCTV between 2020 and 2023. The findings suggest that collaborative videos tend to produce soft news with positive human interest and morality frames, while negative news mainly targets foreign countries' conflicts. Furthermore, collaborative videos mainly use soft propaganda and public opinion guidance to disseminate values and ideologies that are in line with the national interest and lead the audience to support the CPC and the government's political governance, which legitimizes authoritarian rule. These results illustrate how Chinese citizen journalism in the propaganda field contributes to the propaganda strategy of the party and the government, how it has been used to legitimize authoritarian rule, and why its characteristics are significantly different from those of the Western scholars.

Tiesą sakant, priklausomybė nuo pinigų ir valdžios yra dvi pagrindinės priežastis neskaidriam ekonominiam sektoriui susiformuoti. Kad ir kaip bebūtų keista, gyvenimo faktas – tas, jog dideliam pasaulio populiacijos procentui, šešėlinis verslas tampa išgyvenimo priemone, nors Lietuvos Pramonininkų Konfederacijos pareiškimu: „<...> neapskaityta ekonominė veikla, neoficialus darbas, sukčiavimas ir mokesčių vengimas ne tik kenkia šalies įvaizdžiui, ardo oficialią rinką ir konkurencingumą, bet, kartu, negailestingai griauna sąžiningą verslą<...>“. Šio darbo siekis – įvertinti ir suprasti Lietuvos šešėlinės ekonomikos poveikį verslo sėkmei arba legaliai veiklai. Atliktų tyrimų uždaviniai – interpretuoti bendrą pastarojo ekonominio reiškinio kilmės ir šaltinių analizę, apžvelgti, kaip jis atsispindi pinigų statistikoje bei kokia įtaka turi oficialiam verslui, naudojant Tanzi ir Gutmman monetarinius metodus, koreliacija bei Eilat /Zinnes regresijos funkcija. Tyrimų rezultatai apsibrėžtam periodui, nuo 1995 iki 2007 metų, parodė, jog tarp apskaitytos ir neapskaitytos ekonomikų vyrauja neigiamas ryšys, kuris išreiškia substituto efekto pozicionavimą pajamų efekto atžvilgių. Vadinasi, apskaitytoms pajamoms sumažėjus 1LT, šešėlinės pajamos išauga 16 centų. Tuo tarpu, 1LT išaugus apskaitytam BVP, neoficialusis - sumažėja 43 centais. Kitą vertus, monetarinis metodas parodė, jog šešėlinė ekonomika yra glaudžiai susijusi su oficialiais kintamaisiais, todėl norint sumažinti neapskaityto... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Actually, - addiction to money and governance are two main reasons why legal shadow economy arises. As strange it seems, it has not only negative impact, but also a positive one to the official economy. And it‘s a fact of life, that for a large part of the worlds population, the "shadow economy" has become a means of survival, while, accordingly to The Confederation of Lithuanian Industrialists declaration, “<…> unaccounted economic activities, illegal jobs, cheating and tax evasion harm the state, disturb the market and competition and demonstrably ruin and discredit fair business <...>”. The aim of this work - is to evaluate and understand the impact of Lithuania's shadow economy to the official one. The main goals of the research – interpellate the analysis of shadow economy genesis and origins and review how it reflects in nummary statistics or how influence officially accounted economy, using Tanzi’s and Gutmann’s monetary approaches, correlation and Eilat/Zinnes regression function. Exploration findings for the entire period of 1995-2007 confirms, that the unrecorded and recorded economies in Lithuania are negatively related, suggesting that the substitution effect dominates the income effect. And 1 LT fall in recorded income is associated with a 16 cent increase in the unrecorded economy and that a 1LT increase in recorded GDP is associated with a 43 cent decline in unrecorded income. On the other hand, monetary approach showed that shadow economy is closely related... [to full text]