Browsing by master's degree program "International Masters in Economy, State & Society"

This thesis focuses on studying Finland's entrepreneurship policy as the main research direction, specifically examining how to motivate high-impact entrepreneurship. The thesis provides a comprehensive theoretical discussion, addressing entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship policy, and entrepreneurship conditions in the Finnish context. It analyzes core concepts from multiple dimensions, including policy definitions, development processes, and potential challenges and barriers. Through innovative policy retrieval and classification methods, this thesis defines and reconstructs classification dimensions in the absence of previously collected entrepreneurship policy data. It systematically retrieves and summarizes Finland's entrepreneurship policies from 1993 to 2023. The research findings reveal that Finland is dedicated to constructing an innovative, full-lifecycle entrepreneurship policy driven by policy funding. This policy mix aligns with the characteristics of high-impact entrepreneurship and, to some extent, contributes to the development of high-impact entrepreneurship in Finland, as validated by data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. This thesis provides a certain degree of theoretical research foundation and data support for future studies.

This dissertation explores the relationship between regime types, credible commitment institutions and FDI, aiming to answer the puzzle—how do autocratic countries solve the commitment issues and attract a high level of FDI. To achieve this aim, the dissertation was designed to include two empirical chapters and two additional chapters for the introduction and the conclusion. The first empirical chapter examines the effect of regime types and property rights institutions on FDI. The empirical analysis presents a significant and surprising finding that the regime type is not what foreign firms necessarily care about, and what really matters to foreign investors are specific institutional features of the host country—in the present chapter, the effect of property rights institutions is tested. In other words, countries with sound institutions are not necessary democracies. Autocratic countries with well-established institutions to protect property rights and enforce contracts can also attract high level of FDI inflows. The second empirical chapter only focuses on autocratic countries. No longer view all autocratic countries as a single type opposing democratic countries as in the previous chapter; the great institutional differences among autocratic regimes will be witnessed and discussed. I argue that, besides the property rights institutions, some other institutional features—the power-sharing political institutions in some autocratic regimes, as well as the additional protections from international commitment institutions could help autocratic countries attract more FDI inflows. These effects can also complement property rights institutions and jointly affect FDI. Overall, the major contribution of this dissertation is that it verifies what matters for FDI inflows is not regime types but certain credible commitment institutions. The autocratic countries that can solve commitment issues by establishing strong credible commitment institutions can also attract a high level of FDI.

This thesis examines computational propaganda techniques employed by RT (Russia Today) on Twitter by analyzing tweet sentiment and propaganda dynamics. Through quantitative analysis of RT English tweets spanning a decade, the study reveals RT’s strategies in terms of sentiment manipulation, including positive portrayals of Russia and Putin and demonization of adversaries. It further identifies a discernible political bias in RT’s coverage of international relations. The analysis also explores changes in country depictions within RT reports over the past ten years, highlighting the stability of RT’s narratives towards Putin, which suggests the importance of maintaining Putin’s image for Russian state-owned media. Moreover, the study identifies a correlation between the sentiment of tweets related to Russia, the extent of coverage of Putin, and Putin's approval ratings, shedding light on the dynamic nature of RT propaganda and its possible influencing factors. In terms of methodology, machine learning and dictionary-based approaches conducted in sentiment classification yield robust results, indicating the potential of computational methods in social science studies. In general, the research contributes to the understanding of modern propaganda and offers insights into the application of artificial intelligence in social science.

Belt and Road initiative (BRI) has provided by the Chinese government's global infrastructure development strategy in 2013. The New Eurasian Land Bridge (NELB) is the core of the land route of BRI across Eurasia. The main purpose is to build the modern railway infrastructure lines in the Eurasian region. The thesis hypothesis NELB effectively strengthens the capacity of Russia and China for railway transport trade. It influences the further participation of China and Russia in Global Value Chains (GVCs). The study has used the Eora MRIO database on GVCs' output in China and Russia, which takes the data from 2000 to 2018 as a sample. It has combined with the World Integrated Trade Solution (WIST), World Bank and OECD database on the country's trade volume of the export sector and NELB-related indices. It has applied the combination of panel data and time series. The thesis has found that NELB contributed differently to China and Russia. In general terms of GVCs participation, NELB has absorbed Foreign direct investment (FDI) and Information and Communications Technology (ICT) input to China and Russia trade. NELB has benefited China by strengthening its soft infrastructure in financial investment. Moreover, it has benefited Russia's hard infrastructure in the railway transit stations or port establishment. In terms of bilateral trade on GVCs participation. It has conducted China's export and transport of large-scale machinery and equipment to Russia. It also has enhanced Russia's export and transport of energy materials or raw materials to China. Furthermore, NELB has shown the influence on the China and Russia's main export sectors' upgrading and governance in GVCs.

The quantitative easing monetary policies released by the Big Four central banks since 2008 were expected to save these major developed economies from the financial recession, but there is a possibility that these policy changes have a spillover effect on other parts of the world. This thesis constructs a financial systemic risk index from stock market, money market, bond market and foreign exchange market for two groups of economies including 10 developed economies and 10 emerging economies and explained the hypotheses mathematically to prove that an increase in domestic interest rate will cause foreign systemic risks to decrease, while an increase in domestic money supply will cause foreign systemic risks to rise. Then, this thesis builds a time-series dynamic panel data model to evaluate the difference between the spillovers on the two groups, the difference among the Big Four spillovers and the difference between the spillovers of price-based and quantity-based monetary policies, thus answering the research questions and accepting the hypotheses which is consistent with the mathematical explanations. Moreover, the thesis provides possible suggestions for financial supervision and multilateral cooperation in the final part.