Volume 17, Issue 1

The uncertainty that the COVID-19 pandemic has brought demonstrates that income redistribution and traditional debt relief mechanisms are insufficient to meet public spending needs, mitigate external debt, and comply with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which aim to reduce multilateral debt to sustainable levels. Also, West African countries have focused their attention on the long-term fight against poverty and inequality and strengthening their social programs, especially in primary health care and macroeconomic stability. However, for more than a decade, the developing and least developed countries of West Africa have faced rapidly weakening macroeconomic conditions, combining several interrelated crises such as the sharp decline in oil prices, volatile financial markets and tourism disruptions, a global recession, the crisis of climate change, and shortages of food and energy, along with the economic contraction of COVID-19. Data from these countries show that health spending increases economic growth, minimizes infant mortality rates, and reduces debt. Furthermore, increasing government spending efficiency reduces the total debt and improves the health sector, in particular.

The development of world economic relations leads to the intensification of mutual exchange of goods between countries. In the article, we have analyzed the dynamics and structure of Ukraine’s external trade, assessed the degree of import dependence of the domestic market, and determined preconditions and national potential of import substitution of goods, including high-tech ones. We have determined public policy areas of import substitution in Ukraine, which include formation of the list of import-substituting goods, stimulation, export diversification, and the industrial and innovative development of the economy. The purpose of the article is to study the imbalances in Ukraine’s external trade in the context of the implementation of import substitution policy. The article analyzes the statistical and economic indicators, with a view to achieving the final research aims, in the period from 2010 to 2022 in Ukraine, in the service of military actions from 2014, and a full-scale invasion in January 2022, as well as conditions in the pandemic years (2019–21). Other countries are also considered concomitantly. We have drawn conclusions on the tendencies to increase the share of imports in the domestic market and proposed recommendations for the development of effective functioning of the internal market.

This article addresses two key questions concerning US foreign aid under the 45th US President, Donald Trump (2017–21): Did the Trump administration radically restructure the foreign aid apparatus of the US government amid the recent reemergence of China as a key state actor in international development and global governance? If so, how and under which conditions did the US, as the world’s largest foreign aid donor, deal with the new challenges posed by the expanding global reach of Chinese foreign aid and diplomacy? The core objective here is to look back at the Trump administration, particularly in its role in the US foreign aid apparatus vis-à-vis the reemergence of China as a global power and the decline of US influence abroad. This article maintains that the dominance of the US in the international development sector was under serious threat from two principal challenges: (1) the lack of coherent and credible strategy from the Trump administration amid the rapidly increasing influence of China as an aid donor country; and the (2) the declining legitimacy of the US a foreign aid donor due to the exclusionary and anti-globalization discourses of Trump vis-à-vis the perceived the decline of American power.

Roland Benedikter surveys the views of globalization experts, politicians, opinion leaders, intellectuals, and international media regarding Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. On this basis, he draws conclusions about the impact on – and prospect for – the overall course and further direction of globalization. Given the general turn toward re-globalization that the globe has witnessed already since the mid of the 2010s, the question is if the liberal global order is transiting from the “one globalization” concept – as generated by the open societies of the West and Europe after 1989/91 – to a “two globalizations” system inspired by the joint rise of non-democratic and authoritarian powers such as Russia and China since the 2010s. Their now programmatic aspiration to create a “second world order” or a “parallel globalization” is using Russia’s Ukraine war as leverage to unify anti-Western powers in order to start to compete with the West’s idea of the future on the macro-, meso- and micro-levels. The competition between two different concepts of “globalization” will unfold according to the different understandings of what a productively globalized society – including reforms to be implemented through the re-globalization process – is and should be. The opposition between the authoritarian’s and democrat’s concepts of “participatory” societies is instrumental to shape and drive the contest between the “two globalizations.”