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.

Using the findings of a five-year ethnographic study, this thesis examines the contractual relationships that prevail in low-technology moderately competitive industries characteristic of the contemporary Ukrainian economy. The research reports on how contracts are enforced and how the stability of business relationships is ensured in Ukraine. The established view of many scholars that business efficiency is held back in most post-Soviet economies by frequent contractual violations and dysfunctional courts is not entirely supported by the research underpinning this thesis: in Ukraine, contract enforcement is generally effective enough to allow stability in day-to-day transactions, and the commercial courts do provide adequate backing. Although the mechanisms used to enforce contracts in Ukraine are generally similar to those found in developed countries, there are distinctive features within the overall pattern. In particular, firms rely extensively on repeated interactions and self-enforcing devices while signing short-term formal contracts and avoiding interdependency between trading partners. They do not rely on their reputation or business association memberships and they make no use of private arbitration. Instead, a few legal institutions dating back to the Soviet period proved adaptable and viable in a market economy. When transactions involve either state-owned companies or the exercise of administrative resources, contract enforcement becomes problematic. Illegal kickbacks from suppliers and the coercive use of state machinery come into play, and asking a court to enforce a contract is more costly and less effective than in other cases. However, the author shows that in the typical everyday transactions of Ukrainian private firms, the state and its administrative resources are involved in the minority of cases, and that they do not undermine the dominant pattern of orderly contractual dealings. The thesis concludes that the contractual pattern prevalent in Ukraine effectively serves straightforward traditional buyer-seller transactions but it is ill-suited to meet the requirements of globalized trade, production diversification and technological progress. Adaptations of the existing system to meet these requirements are likely to depend upon changes in the wider business environment, namely upon institutions constraining the coercive power of the state.

This thesis analyzes the role of political leadership in post-Soviet democratic transition in Kyrgyzstan by looking at the case of Askar Akaev. Despite the fact that a variety of components can be considered as relevant for the democratic transition process in Kyrgyzstan, due to the highly personalistic nature of Kyrgyz politics, the issue of political leadership needs to be addressed for this purpose. In that sense, the converse trajectories of Kyrgyz democratization (an initial democratic leap till mid-1990s which attracted world-wide attention and made Kyrgyzstan a promising candidate for democratization, afterward a democratic reversion and finally a slip to authoritarianism) correspond to the three stages in Akaev&amp / #8217 / s political leadership style (his emergence as a reform-minded politician, his initial liberal policies in political and economic spheres and his gradual reversion to authoritarianism). As a result, when Askar Akaev was ousted from his office in March 2005 by a public protest, Kyrgyzstan was far away from its world-wide accepted initial trajectory to democracy and became more similar to other authoritarian Central Asian Republics

The EU, over time, has garnered international recognition and acclaim as a successful agent of democratisation in third countries. The transitions of Greece, Spain and Portugal in the 1980s coupled with the recent Eastern enlargements of the EU into erstwhile communist space attest to the success of the EU in fostering tangible democratisation. However, as the EU rapidly approaches its institutional capacity, questions remain as to its viability as an agent of democratisation in the post-enlargement setting where the EU can no longer offer full membership as an incentive for political and economic reform. This thesis attempts to examine the viability of the EU as a democratic facilitator in the post-enlargement setting, through examination of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), a policy described by the EU as ‘everything but institutions’. Two mechanisms of normative transfer relative to the ENP were identified in the literature: conditionality, where the EU attaches incentives for successful political and economic reform, and socialisation, a newer notion whereby norms are transferred via interaction through generating close links with domestic actors. It was ascertained that in the context of the ENP, socialisation represented the dominant mechanism for normative change; conditionality was still utilised as a mechanism, however its scope had reduced greatly. To illuminate the phenomenon of EU democratic promotion, the case study of Armenia was chosen, a small but politically intriguing state in the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood which had experienced (as is the case with the majority of post-Soviet states) stagnation and regression of the democratisation process since independence. Two facets of the EU’s democratisation strategy inherent in the ENP were chosen as empirical research areas: free and fair elections and interaction with domestic civil society organisations (CSOs). Free and fair elections offered evaluation of the conditionality aspects of the ENP through examining the 2008 Armenian presidential election. Interaction with domestic Armenian CSOs presented a rich phenomenon to examine the impact of socialisation in the ENP through utilising a case study examining four democratically minded NGOs. Ultimately, this thesis contends that through the ENP, the EU can no longer effectively wield conditionality as a viable mechanism of normative change and currently lacks the tools or a suitable environment to initialise normative transfers through socialisation. Consequently, it is argued that the EU has had little effect in facilitating democratisation in Armenia since the advent of the ENP.