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In the era of digitalization, legislation formed in another time can fail to accommodate modern society’s rapidly changing practices. Negotiable debt instruments (sw. löpande skuldebrev) have traditionally been in paper form and thus the legislation surrounding it, mainly the act on instruments on debt (sw. lagen (1936:81) om skuldebrev), is based on the assumption that negotiable debt instruments exist in physical form. In line with digitalization, electronic negotiable debt instruments have emerged on the market which pose into question whether new technology in the form of electronic negotiable debt instruments can be aligned with the current legislation. The main problem experienced by courts and administrative authorities is whether it is enough for an electronic negotiable debt instruments to meet the requirement of the letter of the law or if further legal requirements exists. The answer was recently delivered by the Supreme Court of Sweden who established that electronic negotiable debt instruments can exist provided that they enable the same control over the information of the debt, that functional substitutes for possession of the document exists and that the protective aims of the act on instruments on debt is upheld. The decision by the Supreme Court clarifies what the established law for electronic negotiable debt instruments is but offers little practical guidance as how the Supreme Court’s requirements are to be met from a practical point of view. Thus, this essay looks at three practical solutions for electronic negotiable debt instruments; legislative solutions, contractual solutions and technical solutions, and evaluate them against the established law. This evaluation results in varying compatibility with the established law but illustrate that there are practical solutions that could be adapted to fit electronic negotiable debt instruments and be legally enforceable, provided a teleological interpretation of debt collecting laws and ordinances. The essay concludes with a discussion as to the disincentives and incentives for the legislator or market participants to choose to take one or more of the solutions into practice and if so what solution would be preferable. It is argued that contractual and technical solutions are preferred as they do not require a new system of legislation. However, from a practical point of view it is argued that the legislator should clarify the status of electronic negotiable debt instruments in current legislation and ordinances that govern the Swedish Enforcement Authority in their debt collecting practice.

We provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of environmental governance and policy in Kazakhstan as the country is assumed to have a leading role in Central Asia in terms of green growth and sustainable development. The overview of the environmental and institutional framework in the country reveals that the significant steps towards an improvement of environmental governance have been undertaken.

We provide a comprehensive overview of the current state of environmental governance concerning air pollution, water problems and waste generation in Kazakhstan. The overview of the environmental and institutional framework in these fields reveals that major environmental problems exist in the country. Some steps have already been taken to ensure a proper management of air, waste and water. However, more coordinated cross-sectoral actions, both on the regional and the national level, need to be undertaken to ensure a productive cooperation between state institutions, business and the society.

This paper deals with the hypothesis that natural resources are important in forming convergence clubs. We check this hypothesis by applying a dependence and an endowment measure of natural resource abundance and a regression tree analysis. The results indicate that for the Kazakh regions natural resources indeed play an important role in forming convergence clubs. It is further shown that rather natural resource endowment than resource dependence determines initial conditions and thereby convergence clubs.

The establishment of the currently negotiated Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the EU and Ukraine is the next significant step towards Ukraine's deeper integration into the world economy, widely expected to result in additional welfare gains. As developing countries face some costs associated with trade liberalization, this paper contributes to the literature by analyzing the effects of the EU-Ukraine FTA taking into account the loss of tariff revenues as well as the changed economic conditions after Ukraine's accession to the WTO in 2008. In particular, we calculate the effects of a unilateral tariff elimination in a Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model for Ukraine simulating three scenarios reflecting different means to compensate for the loss in tariff revenues. It turns out to be important to take these costs into consideration while modeling trade liberalization, as the results vary significantly across the scenarios. In general, we find that tariff elimination has only a small impact on the country's welfare because of the already strongly reduced tariff rates after Ukraine's WTO accession. The effects can even be negative if the country tries to refinance the trade liberalization costs by means of tax policy. According to our simulations the most welfare enhancing option would be the provision of financial support by the EU, which is in fact suggested in the latest European Parliament resolution.

This paper investigates patterns and determinants of growth in Ukraine in a medium-term and a long-term perspective. During 2000-2008, high growth in Ukraine was sup-ported by favourable external conditions and was mainly demand-driven. Due to the massive decline of external demand and the reversal of capital flows during the global financial crisis some factors that have underpinned growth since 2000 have been ex-hausted. The terms of trade have already deteriorated and foreign credits granted to households and enterprises, which fuelled the consumption boom, have already strongly declined In addition to capital deepening, long-term growth will therefore require maintaining robust total factor productivity, i.e. transfer of technology and efficient allocation of resources. Poor economic and political framework conditions are the main development barriers in Ukraine. Implicit and explicit subsidies, excessive state ownership, corrup-tion, weak competition and high levels of regulatory uncertainty constitute the principal obstacles to an increase of the level and efficiency of investment. The paper suggests some main areas of reforms to overcome these obstacles.