Post COVID-19: Building Resilience in Central Asia

Issues Paper: June 2020 | Dr. Ariel Cohen and James Grant | Download This timely and edifying paper details COVID-19’s impact on Central Asia while outlining policy solutions for recovery. The main topic of this report is resilience – the ability of each nation to adapt to current crises and mitigate against future shocks.

Securing Capital Investment in Ukraine’s Grid: The Road to the Future

Issues Paper: June 2020 | Dr. Ariel Cohen and Vladislav Inozemtsev | Download In this paper, Drs. Ariel Cohen and Vladislav Inozemtsev present both the challenges of introducing a Regulatory Asset Base (RAB) tariff regulation in Ukraine’s electricity sector and the benefits it may bring to the industry, consumers, and the public finances of Ukraine.

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Soft Infrastructure Development in Central Asia 2020

Issues Paper: October 2019 | Dr. Ariel Cohen and James Grant | Download As readers will discover in Soft Infrastructure Development in Central Asia 2020, the effectiveness of soft infrastructure development often must be measured indirectly through statistics such as the perception of corruption rather than directly. Ultimately, the best measure of how well soft

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Future Calling: Infrastructure Development in Central Asia

Issues Paper: October 2018 | Dr. Ariel Cohen and James Grant | Download “Development debates often focus on natural curses and blessings. For some countries, being landlocked is a curse resulting in difficult and costly access to/from markets. However, for the countries comprising Central Asia, most notably Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, in ancient times and today,

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Russia’s Landmark BRICS Summit and the Specter of De-Dollarization

Last week saw a landmark summit of the BRICS group of nations, a nine-country economic bloc led by Moscow and Beijing, which drew representatives from 36 countries, including 22 heads of state. Held from Oct. 22 to Oct. 24 in the Russian city of Kazan, the event focused largely on “de-dollarization”—the idea of phasing out

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Joe Biden’s Iran Oil Sanctions Failure

As Iran is spending billions of dollars funding Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthi militias in Yemen, Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and Katai’b Hezbollah in Iraq, the recently released Energy Information Administration (EIA) report on Iranian petroleum exports stands out as a sobering reminder that the Obama-Biden on-and-off sanctions on Tehran have failed. In fact, as the sanctions against the Kremlin over its invasion of Ukraine suggest, sanctions alone are

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Google’s Search For AI-Enabling Secure Energy Goes Nuclear

As Google’s AI energy needs skyrocket, the company recently inked a deal with Kairos Power, a nuclear power company started in 2016, to meet Google’s growing energy needs. The deal between the two companies includes plans to bring a small modular reactor online by 2030 and produce up to 500MW by 2035, according to a

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China Bets On Leadership In The Green Tech Frontier

At the 2024 BRICS summit, China claimed that its advances in Green Tech serve as a “valuable reference” for the bloc and the globe. While Beijing talks a good game about its investments in renewables as an engine of domestic and global economic growth, the realities of China’s sluggish economy suggest otherwise. Earlier this month, China

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The Summit Of The Future’s Vision: Will It Help The Energy-Poor Now?

Following the latest United Nations General Assembly, the UN Summit of the Future adopted the “Pact for the Future,” a document filled with ambitious pledges to tackle climate change, peace and security, and global inequalities. Secretary General of the UN Guterres proclaimed the pact a “’once in a generation’ opportunity to renew multilateral cooperation”.  The

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Vance And Walz On America’s Energy Future

Amid the destruction of Hurricane Helene, which caused catastrophic flooding and power outages across five states, the two vice presidential candidates, Senator JD Vance (R-OH) and Governor Tim Walz (D-MN), debated the future of U.S. clean energy policies at the first (and only) vice presidential debate of the 2024 campaign in New York. While the debate primarily

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