Mait Talts,Tallinn University of Technology
Recently the Institute for European Studies at the study centre International University Audentes of the School of Economics and Business Administration of TUT published a peer-reviewed collection of research articles “Socio-economic and Institutional Environment: Harmonisation in the EU Countries of Baltic Sea Rim”, which is the fourth from the series of the Proceedings of the Institute for European Studies. The fourth collection issued this winter was compiled by Prof Aksel Kirch and it is dedicated to the 10th Anniversary of the Institute, which was celebrated last year. Last year was also the year when the institute together with International University Audentes became an integral part of Tallinn University of Technology.
There are articles dedicated to the economic environment development as well as the problems of integration of ethnic minorities into Estonian and Latvian societies. As the editor-in-chief puts it, one of the common denominators of this collection is the usage of the models of development of socio-economic and institutional environment and the integration of the society, which has been observed both from the perspective of a member state as well as from the perspective of the union.
Among the authors are such outstanding figures as the director of the Institute for World Economics of Hungarian Academy of Sciences Prof András Inotai and the leader of the Finnish Pan-European Institute Prof Kari Liuhto. TUT study centre IUA is represented by the articles of Professors Aksel Kirch and Ülo Ennuste, Associate Professors David Ramiro Troitiño and Mihails Rodins, postgraduate students Olga Nežerenko and Arutyun Arutyunyan. The most remote contribution to collection comes from New Zealand. It is a legal analysis of the European Union made by the researchers Vlad Vernygora and Natalia Chaban from the Centre for European Research of Canterbury University, New Zealand.