This paper shows an empirical assessment of social unrest dynamics in the Eurasian countries. We use a big database of social events (GDELT) to build up several real time indexes of social unrest escalation by social agents divided in several stages consistent with the Unrest Lifecycle Theory (vindication, protest and conflict) and alternatives measures of state response (repression and cooperation). We build a Vector Autoregressive (VAR) model to analyse the unrest dynamic cycle of social agents and state response. Our results show that Eurasia is a fairly volatile region in what shock-generation and inertia relates. Social reactivity is also relevant but we find that this is stronger at the initial stages of unrest while it decays as the intensity of shocks increases. Repressive state response is a fact but it decays too in intensity as the conflict escalates along the unrest cycle, falling even into an accommodative mode. We attribute this behaviour to the limited state enforcing ability of among other things. Unrest and government action are not homogenous across the region, West and Central Eurasia are more prone to conflict escalation and their enforcing ability of the state is also lower. This gives an insight were prevalent unrest theories such as unrest lifecycle; deterrence and backslash seem more dominant. We also find traces of spill over-effects or contagion among countries who share boundaries but the intensity and sign is undefined. We compare these stylized facts against the MENA region and suggest that Eurasia carries similar though milder dynamics in all terms, volatility and reactivity of social unrest, state response and enforcing inability and contagion.

Portfolio flows across Emerging Markets (EMs) have been particularly volatile over the last years. Financial distress at the beginning of the crisis was followed by monetary policy reactions in developed economies and emerging countries triggering push and pull forces favourable for flow dynamics across Emerging Markets. Subsequent actions and discussion over the exit strategies of central banks in developed economiesparticularly the Fed -were behind the various waves of risk-on/-off sentiment in financial markets. We propose a cross over approach (Dinamic Linear Model / Factor Augmented VAR) to disentangle the net effects of global shocks. This paper will focus on the effects of Monetary Policy in the North (more specifically, monetary policy normalization by the FED and the QE by the ECB) on cross border portfolio flows to the South (Emerging Markets) under six alternative plausible scenarios.Our proposal adds to the current state of the art in three ways: (i) offering a enhanced framework that bonds the concept of unobservable Global/Regional factors with the concept of global push and pull forces by means of a DLM/FAVAR model, (ii) extending the analysis of shocks from the North beyond the Monetary Policy normalization from Fed to the taming effect of the protracted ECB's QE and (iii) coupling high frequency data from EPFR with Balance of Payments data as reported by the IMF.