Attitudes towards EU migrants in the UK: the influence of ethnicity, nationality, and location by Alexandra Bulat, and What are the main factors leading to transition success of EBRD investment projects? by Natalia Kryg

UCL SSEES Research students, Alexandra Bulat and Natalia Kryg will present their research in this double bill presentation. (UCL SSEES)

Alexandra Bulat will present on Attitudes towards EU migrants in the UK: the influence of ethnicity, nationality, and location. The issue of ‘uncontrolled EU immigration’ to the UK has been at the top of the political agenda at least since the 2004 EU Enlargement.

Opinion polls have captured increasingly more negative attitudes towards immigration. For example, results from the British Social Attitudes Survey show over 70% of respondents wanting immigration reduced either by ‘a little’ or ‘a lot’.

Although politicians and the media tend to select specific nationalities (usually East European ones) when making the argument for reducing immigration, survey items measure attitudes considering ‘EU migration’ as a homogenous category. At the same time, a simple search on Google Images suggests different EU nationalities and ethnicities are associated with a broad range of stereotypes (compare the search terms ‘Romanian migrants UK’ and ‘Spanish migrants UK’, for instance).

In what ways do migrants’ ethnicity and nationality influence attitudes towards them in the UK? How are national and ethnic stereotypes of EU citizens formed and reaffirmed? How do EU migrants themselves respond to these portrayals? Those are some of the questions this research aims to answer.

This presentation will outline the context, main concepts, and methodological approach of this project. A research poster presented by the author at the Doctoral School Poster Competition (runner-up prize winner) will also be displayed, offering more insight into the two locations (Stratford and Clacton-on-Sea) chosen for fieldwork.

Alexandra Bulat is a first-year MPhil/PhD student in Politics&Sociology at SSEES. Her project is supervised by Prof Anne White and Dr Richard Mole.

Natalia Kryg will examine What are the main factors leading to transition success of EBRD investment projects?

Over the last decade, multilateral development banks have been under increasing pressure to demonstrate that they achieve the results for which they were originally set up for. This has put the spotlight on project selection and evaluation criteria applied by the banks to ensure their investment projects comply with their institutional mandates and pursue the non-financial objectives set out by shareholder agreements.

Unlike other development banks, EBRD’s principle mission is to help countries transition towards being fully functioning market economies, through its investment projects. Thus, the bank is committed to factoring in transition related objectives in its project lending criteria.

This research leads to further understanding of how certain characteristics of EBRD project design and structure as well as client and country specifics, impact the likelihood of project success. The research takes a holistic approach by looking at three categories of factors (i.e. project-, client- and country- related factors), their interactions and interdependency. The sample covers over 1,600 projects signed and completed between 2003 and 2016 across all countries of the Bank’s operation. The issue of project selection bias is addressed which has often been omitted in the literature on project performance of other development banks.

This presentation will outline the analytical framework behind EBRD project performance analysis and methodological approaches used, as well as some preliminary results and further steps.

Natalia Kryg is an MPhil/PhD candidate in Economics at UCL SSEES. Consisting of a collection of empirical essays on the topic of banking performance, her PhD portfolio’s research is jointly supervised by Julia Korosteleva (UCL SSEES) and Raphael Espinoza (IMF). She works at EBRD as an associate in Country Strategy & Results Management department.

A seminar hosted by the UCL SSEES Social Sciences & Arts and Humanities Research Student  Seminars.
Student Coordinators: Peter Braga and Liisa Tuhkanen

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