This paper examines whether there is a premium in country size. We study whether there are significant gains from being a small or a large country in terms of certain socioeconomic indicators, and how large this premium is. Using panel data for 200 countries over 50 years, we estimate premia for various sizes of nations across a variety of key economic and socioeconomic performance indicators. We find that smaller countries are richer, have larger governments, and are more prudent in terms of fiscal policies than larger ones. Smaller countries seem to be subject to higher absolute and per capita costs for provision of essential public goods, which may lower their socio-economic performance in terms of health and education. In terms of economic performance, small countries seem to do better than large countries, compensating for smallness by relying on foreign trade and foreign direct investment. The latter comes at the cost of higher vulnerability to external shocks, resulting in higher volatility of growth rates. This paper's findings offer essential guidance to policymakers, international organizations, and business researchers in general, especially those assessing a country's economic or socioeconomic performance or potential. The study implies that comparisons with medium-sized or large countries may be of little utility in predicting the performance of small countries.

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This paper uses large cross-country data for 110 countries to examine the effectiveness of COVID vaccination coverage during the delta variant outbreak. Our results confirm that vaccines are reasonably effective in both limiting the spread of infections and containing more severe disease progression in symptomatic patients. First, the results show that full vaccination rate is consistently negatively correlated with the number of new COVID cases, whereby a 10 percent increase in vaccination rate is associated with a 1.3 to 1.7 percent decrease in new COVID cases. Second, the magnitude of vaccination is shown to contribute significantly to moderating severe disease progression. On average, a 10 percent increase in the rate of vaccination leads to a reduction of about 5 percent in the number of new hospitalizations, 12 percent decrease in the number of new intensive care patients and 2 percent reduction in the number of new deaths. Finally, by comparing the data for the same period between 2020 and 2021, we also check how well vaccination performs as a substitute for lockdowns or other stringent government protection measures. Results suggest that vaccination appears to be an effective substitute for more stringent government safety measures to contain the spread of COVID infections only at a sufficiently high vaccination coverage threshold (more than 70 percent). On the other hand, vaccination is shown to be quite effective in limiting the more severe course of the disease in symptomatic patients already at moderate vaccination coverage (between 40 and 70 percent). This suggests that vaccination can also help to reduce pressure on the health system and thus benefit the overall public health of society. On the other hand, the efficient rollout of vaccines could explain the favourable economic performance in the second half of 2021 despite the severe outbreak of the delta variant.

This paper uses large cross-country data for 110 countries to examine the effectiveness of COVID vaccination coverage. Our results confirm that vaccines are reasonably effective in both limiting the spread of infections and containing more severe disease progression in symptomatic patients. First, the results show that full vaccination rate is consistently negatively correlated with the number of new COVID cases, whereby a 10 percent increase in vaccination rate is associated with a 1.3 to 1.7 percent decrease in new COVID cases. Second, the magnitude of vaccination is shown to contribute significantly to moderating severe disease progression. On average, a 10 percent increase in the rate of vaccination leads to a reduction of about 5 percent in the number of new hospitalizations, 12 percent decrease in the number of new intensive care patients and 2 percent reduction in the number of new deaths. Finally, by comparing the data for the same period between 2020 and 2021, we also check how good is vaccination as a substitute for lockdowns or other stringent government protection measures. Results suggest that vaccination does not appear to be an effective substitute for more stringent government safety measures to contain the spread of COVID infections until a high vaccination coverage threshold (more than 70 percent) has been achieved. On the other hand, vaccination is shown to be quite effective in limiting the more severe course of the disease in symptomatic patients already at moderate vaccination coverage (between 40 and 70 percent). This suggests that vaccination can also help to reduce pressure on the health system and thus benefit the overall public health of society.

Because of deploying specific methods of privatization that favoured domestic over foreign owners and that enabled both internal owners and state-controlled funds to gain control over companies, corporate governance in Slovenia used to be a cumbersome issue over the last two decades. This led to an on-going battle for control over companies. On one side, in addition to management buy-outs, internal owners used peculiar methods, such as “shares parking” at related companies to gain control over companies of interest without having to engage in a takeover procedure. On the other side, the government used its state-controlled funds to gain control over strategic companies in specific sectors, such as finance, energy, transport and telecommunications. Combined with direct holdings of assets by the state, this gave the existing political coalition in power a mechanism to exert control over a large number of companies and to interfere with the management of privatized firms through an adverse selection of candidates for supervisory boards and board of directors. The victims of these unsound corporate governance practices were usually small shareholders and suboptimal performance of companies. For a private sector, the “game-changer” was a financial crisis that deprived many management-owned companies of control over the companies, while government involved in some changes in the regulatory framework to fight peculiar corporate governance practices. However, while Slovenia has gradually established a modern framework for a transparent corporate governance system, regulating listed and non-listed private companies as well as SOEs, the practices deployed by the parties are still far from transparent, adequate and professional.