From March 2020 to the end of the review period in January 2022, Slovenia was governed by a minority coalition government led by Prime Minister Janez Janša, president of the center-right Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS). The other political parties of the governing coalition...

Despite a rapidly aging population and alarmingly high levels of public debt, Japan remains one the three largest economies in the world. Its per capita economic growth rate is roughly in line with that of the United States and the EU. However, disposable incomes have risen...

In the final stretch of the Moon Jae-in administration – with presidential elections held in March 2022 – several long-term tasks prioritized and set forth by President Moon in his 100 Policy Tasks (2017) and New Deal (2020) remained relevant and important for the future of...

The period under review was characterized by social unrest, political realignment and economic struggles due to the massive, in some cases violent protests that had taken place by the end of 2019, as well as the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, economic growth in Latvia was persistently above the average EU rate, with the economy growing by an average of 3.3.% annually. The 2019 Global Competitiveness Index ranked Latvia 41st among 141 surveyed world economies. This growth created...

Spain was one of the countries around the world most affected by COVID-19, both in terms of the number of infections and number of deaths. Available data points to the bulk of COVID-19 infections and deaths in Spain being attributable to structural factors (e.g., demographic...

Over the course of 2021, Croatia stayed economically and politically stable. The economy staged a swift recovery due to a combination of several factors, particularly the reliance on extensive furlough schemes that had been rolled out in 2020, the policy credibility...

Formal democracy is well developed in Lithuania. Participation rights, electoral competition and the rule of law are generally respected by the Lithuanian authorities. Lithuania has also actively supported the pro-democracy movement in Belarus. Substantive democracy, in...

Undoubtedly, democracy in Sweden remains robust; the country continues to score highly across the gamut of sustainable governance indicators, with little change since the previous report. This mundane observation becomes quite salient if contextualized in the second year of...

The sustained course of Cyprus’s economic growth was abruptly interrupted by the COVID-19 crisis, which had a significant impact on the country’s main sectors, tourism and construction, among others. Recovery started at the beginning of and continued through 2021. The...