The recent political and fiscal crises in Kyrgyzstan offer a good opportunity to rethink the objectives and the direction of tax reform. The tax system of the Kyrgyz Republic has changed substantially since 1991 including a shift of the tax structure towards indirect taxation, reduction in a number of taxes, and drastic decrease in tax rates. The thesis aims to identify and describe the main factors influencing tax reform in Kyrgyzstan during the first decades of transition to a market economy using important theoretical model of public management reform. So, it will critically review the applicability of a Pollitt-Bouckaert’s model in this context and implications for how the model could be adapted to fit the tax reform process in post-Soviet transition countries. Accomplishment of these goals would require a multiple methods approach based on the assumption that collecting diverse types of data sequentially in the embedded single-case study will provide more complete understanding of research questions than either quantitative or qualitative data alone. For the study of tax reform, the quantitative data are subjected to time-series analysis of the embedded units while the qualitative interviews remain critical in explaining the main proposition central to the entire case study. The study starts with the theoretical assumption that the factors identified in the model have significant effect on tax reform process. This basic proposition – the impact of socio-economic forces, political changes, administrative system, elite’s decisions, and chance events on the reform process – will be traced for each factor in ‘within-country’ explanatory case study. The fundamental part of this thesis is the Pollitt and Bouckaert’s model of public management reform, which will provide a framework for discussion of the main forces influencing the reform process. As a diagram of main factors of the public sector reform, this model will be further adapted and modified for tax reform purposes. However, the direction of tax reform in the Kyrgyz Republic cannot be understood completely without a good knowledge of the main legacies of the Soviet Union, the cultural and institutional features of centralized planning system, which have left a long-lasting impact on trajectory of the economic and political development in the country. Therefore, the model proposed by Pollitt and Bouckaert does not include other forces, which have substantial impact on reform. In particular, it needs to take more account of significant importance of the development partners in tax reform process.

Egypt in the early Byzantine period was a bilingual country where Greek and Egyptian (Coptic) were used alongside each other. Historical studies as well as linguistic studies of the phonology and lexicon of early Byzantine Greek in Egypt testify to this situation. In order to describe the linguistic traces the language-contact situation left behind in individuals' linguistic output, this thesis analyses the syntax of early Byzantine Greek texts from Egypt. The primary object of interest is bilingual interference in the syntax of verbs, adverbial phrases, discourse organising devices and formulaic sections. The thesis is based on a corpus of Greek and Coptic private letters on papyrus, all of which date from the fourth to mid-seventh centuries, originate from Egypt and belong to bilingual, Greek-Coptic, papyrus archives. The data is analysed with a particular focus on three interrelated questions: (1) What kinds of deviations from the standard pattern appear and to what extent can language-internal confusion account for them? (2) How are instances of language-internal confusion and bilingual interference distributed over the selected syntactic domains? (3) Do deviations from the standard accumulate in certain letters or archives belonging to the corpus and do they correlate with additional indicators of bilingualism such as code-switching or circumstantial information about writers? In addition to answering these questions, the thesis seeks to explain the observed distributions. The results obtained from this study suggest that bilingual interference is linked to the way writers assimilated structures. In fact, there is a marked difference between deviating syntactic structures in non-formulaic and formulaic contexts. The study further suggests that bilingual interference does not affect every domain of syntax to the same degree. The degree of complexity of the syntactic structure in question as well as the degree of divergence from the corresponding Coptic structure seem to play a role.

This thesis examines the relationship between professional practice and professional training of Christian ministers in post-Communist Central Asia. It responds to the call for study of the phenomenon of Protestant theological education in the post-Soviet bloc. Theological education in Central Asia has been developed without any research-led evaluation and is often found unsatisfactory by the emerging church, which calls for a more relevant, field-driven and contextualised training of its leaders. This study also responds to the gap in the literature on attitude development of ministerial students. This is a qualitative inquiry. Its primary emphasis is on in-depth semi-structured interviews of forty graduates of four major theological colleges in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, who had spent several years in pastoral ministry after graduation. This research seeks to identify the most common problems they face in professional practice; to identify the attitudes and capabilities underlying their problem-solving processes; and to analyse how their training enabled or failed to enable them to develop those qualities. This thesis argues that theological education can be viewed as a special case of professional training, with a unique cluster of spiritual qualities that are of paramount importance for the success of ministers. It also argues that, despite the graduates’ generally positive appraisal of their training, there was little connection between the training and the capabilities that the graduates needed to succeed in their current practice. It therefore argues that the institutions in Central Asia have inherited the flaws of the "schooling" paradigm of theological education. A more integrated, context-specific and missional model is needed. By developing a model for investigating the practical knowledge of ministers, this study attempts to provide the training institutions in question with a framework of capabilities and attitudes. This will allow those institutions to have a useful starting point in the reformulation of their curricula.

We examine the effect of merger announcements on the stock performance of acquirers' industry rivals in the context of Chinese and US deals between 1994 and 2017. Our analysis reveals that investors of rivals are able to earn abnormal returns during days around merger announcement, meaning that markets are not fully efficient as implied by the Efficient market hypothesis. We conclude that in a reaction to the announcement, US rivals achieve generally negative abnormal returns with higher magnitude and volatility compared to Chinese rivals. Additionally, we observe that Chinese investors' perception of mergers turned out to be more conservative after the Global financial crisis. During days around the merger announcement, signs of rivals' abnormal returns also differ on whether the target is public or private in both countries. Rivals operating in industries that are substantially supported by Chinese government such as real estate, pharmaceuticals, and chemicals experience positive reaction on mergers of their competitors. Furthermore, we find that industries with increasing im- portance in Chinese developing economy such as banking, telecommunications, and cyclical consumer products show a positive reaction of rivals' returns on merger announcements while in the developed US economy, a negative...