AIESEC alumnus, elected as new President of Portugal
Portugal's former centre-right prime minister Anibal Cavaco Silva, who has vowed to help revive a stagnant economy, narrowly won a presidential election on Sunday in the first round, official results showed.
Mr. Silva, the former Prime Minister of Portugal held the democratic position of a Prime Minister for 10 years. Though Mr. Silva’s leadership experience and positions started in way back to when he was in university and was a member of AIESEC. He was Vice-President of the AIESEC local office in ISCEF, Lisbon. Mr. Silva joined AIESEC in 1959 and through participating in various activities developed his network and his leadership skills.
Mr. Silva was also involved in the expansion of AIESEC in Brazil and Africa. He went on to work for the organization for 2 years during his university life.
Apart from bring involved in work, it is through AIESEC that Mr.Silva was able to build his network in and outside Portugal by participating in various national conferences in Portugal.
He has always admired AIESEC and still supports the organization through way of an endorsement. The last time he said ‘“AIESEC is an open space for achievements in the modern world for young students of economics and management”.
Mr. Silva is an alumnus of AIESEC and is one of the many political leaders this organization has give the initial platform to gain leadership experience. Some of the other leaders in the world that are alumni of the organization are Mr. Maarti Athisaari, former President of Finland, Mr. Aleksander Kwasniewski, former President of Poland, Helmut Kohl, former chancellor of Germany and many more.
More information at
www.aiesec.org/president/.
Two interesting articles from the Economist
Some interesting articles published in recent editions:
A recent study by the IMF argued that, if France implemented the structural reforms it has promised, this would raise its national income by around 10% (compared with doing nothing). But if everybody in the euro area did the same, French incomes would rise by 14%.As Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, once put it, "we all know what to do. We just don't know how to be re-elected once we've done it".
New traineeship in Bucharest, Romania
We have two new traineeships in
Bucharest, Romania.
National Agency for Supporting Youth Initiatives wants to take trainees whose main responsibilities will be to
evaluate the projects written in English; check the financial part of the final reports; introduce the projects in English in the database of the European Commission (Youth Programme); be involved within the team activities on special occasions and every time is necessary.
Note that the starting date of these traineeships is very close! If you are interested, don't wait and apply now! More information at:
TN-In-RO-BU-2006-1325 and
TN-In-RO-BU-2006-1326.
2 traineeships in Bucharest, Romania
We have 2 new traineeships raised! If you want to get some international experience we encourage you to go to
2nd District City Hall in Bucharest, Romania. Trainee will have to prepare a strategy of district promotion; prepare a report regarding the possibility to conclude partnerships with NGO’s in order to implement projects and programmes; realize a web page, as a link to our web site, to promote The 2nd District.
More information about the forms is available here:
Become Member of European Parliament!
Polish Robert Schuman Foundation launched
on-line game where young people can become Members of European Parliament and participate in parliament's work. They can predict results of votings in European Parliament, discuss and convince others to own opinions, answer questions about European Union and more.
Till 1st February organizers received around 2.100 applications from whole Poland. Everybody who would like to join the game can still do it till the end of the gamte (from 1st Feb to 30th June 2006).
The award for the best players of the game is a trip to Brussel and participation in a real session of European Parliament. Winners will be hosted by Vice President
Janusz Onyszkiewicz and MEP
Boguslaw Sonik. Every month the best players are going to be awarded with additional prizes such as USB drives, publication and EP gadgets.
More information about the game at gra.schuman.org.pl. Learn more about European Parliament at www.europarl.eu.int.
Traineeship in Sokolka, Poland
There is a new traineeship available in
Municipal Office in Sokolka, Poland (TN-In-PL-BI-2006-1298). It should last from 8 up to 12 weeks. An intern will be responsible for three things: (1) establishing contacts with public administration units and non-governmental organization in trainee’s country, (2) supporting establishing contacts with foreign companies and (3) translating and compiling municipality's webpage into English language (
www.sokolka.pl).
More information about the municipality and the traineeship you can find at
EU City website.
Assessing Approximation of Administrative Principles and Practices among EU Member States
The public administration is a domestic affair for EU Member States. However, national public administrations have to apply the acquis communautaire in a homogeneous way in order to ensure that European citizens are able to enjoy the rights granted to them by the EU Treaties, irrespective of the country in which they live. National administrations have to apply European legislation as if it were domestic legislation. Do the other Member States have an interest in ensuring that each national administration has comparable quality and professionalism? Is there a process of administrative convergence among EU Member States? Are there benchmarks against which this convergence can be assessed?
Want to know more? Click
here
Ideal Government Europe
I have just found a great website
"Ideal Government Europe" where are many news published regarding e-government in Europe. In authours' manifesto they state: "It costs us in Europe €88bn a year. But did we ever say what we wanted? Are e-government projects designed for citizens? Do we use them? Should we trust them? Let's blog it here." It's brilliant and definitely I'm going to track it!
Some of the recent posts:
Globalisation = bigger government
Paolo Epifani and
Gino Gancia argue that the relationship between trade openness and the size of government is "remarkably reobust' in their new paper,
On Globalization and the Growth of Governments:
This paper investigates the relationship between trade openness and the size of government, both theoretically and empirically. We show that openness can increase the size of governments through two channels: (1) a terms of trade externality, whereby trade lowers the domestic cost of taxation and (2) the demand for insurance, whereby trade raises risk and public transfers. We provide a unified framework for studying and testing these two mechanisms.First, we show how their relative strength depends on a key parameter, the elasticity of substitution between domestic and foreign goods. Second, while the terms of trade externality leads to inefficiently large governments, the increase in public spending due to the demand for insurance is optimal. We show that large volumes of trade may result in welfare losses if the terms of trade externality is strong enough while small volumes of trade are always beneficial. Third, we provide new evidence on the positive association between openness and the size of government and test whether it is consistent with the terms of trade externality or the demand for insurance.Our findings suggest that the positive relationship is remarkably robust and that the terms of trade externality may be the driving force behind it, thus raising warnings that globalization may have led to inefficiently large governments.Source:
New Economist
Global Corruption Report 2006
Transparency International has released
Global Corruption Report 2006. This year’s edition has a special focus on corruption and health. The book includes expert reports on:
- the risks of corruption in different health care systems
- the scale of the problem: from high-level corruption in Costa Rica to counterfeit medicines in Nigeria to
- health care fraud in the United States
- the costs of corruption in hospital administration and the problem of informal payments for health care
- the impact of corruption at various points of the pharmaceutical chain
- anti-corruption challenges posed by the fight against HIV/AIDS
It also includes:
- detailed assessments of the state of corruption in 45 countries*
- recommendations for cleaning up the health sector
- examples of successes in preventing health-related bribery, fraud and corruption
- the latest corruption-related research, including studies on the links between corruption and other global
- issues such as pollution, gender and foreign investment.
* You can find here information about such CEE countries as Croatia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Ukraine.
Politics in CEE
Although this is not political blog, I think that you may be interested in learning more about polical reality in CEE countries. If yes, then I advise you to read an article in new the Economist
"Party games".
