After a year that included the Arab Awakening, the euro crisis, Japan’s nuclear catastrophe, the killing of Osama bin Laden, and the unanticipated reaction to Russia’s recent parliamentary elections, there are many unanswered questions left for 2012.
Russian authorities see the protests as the most serious challenge to their power since taking office in 2000. The coming year will be momentous for Russian politics, with unpredictable outcomes and potentially dangerous consequences.
Twenty years after the Soviet collapse, leaders of the five Central Asian republics have built functioning states but they have yet to fully implement democratic reforms, decentralize and share power, and develop strong intraregional relations.
As China’s leaders seek to preserve stability in 2012, they face a host of challenges, including reduced economic flexibility, increasing social, unrest, widening income disparities, and escalating external tensions.
With the global economy on unstable ground and little economic space remaining for additional policy support, world leaders must focus on preventing a catastrophe in Europe.
Twenty years after its independence from the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan has made a smooth transition to a middle income country and advanced a foreign policy that could make it a vital bridge between Europe and Asia.
Alabama’s new immigration law, which has led to inadvertent arrests of foreign business executives, risks becoming the next example of a bad government decision bred by a period of economic trouble.
Trade deficits generated by credit-fueled consumption are unsustainable, and can be reversed by either shifts in the policies of surplus-producing countries abroad or by crippling austerity at home.
Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia face a number of shared challenges, including weak rule of law, entrenched corruption, and incomplete democratization.
The political turmoil in Russia, though not directly affecting the economic landscape, could expose vulnerabilities in the Russian economy if nervous foreign investors continue to retreat.























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