Rising unit values of Central and Eastern European exports: Rising quality in transition?

This paper observes rising unit values, prices per kilogram, of Central and Eastern European exports and argues that it is an evidence of actual rising product quality during the transition period. We arrive at this conclusion by applying a number of methods on a best available dataset for the ten countries from 1995 to 2005. On this dataset we also apply two new methods to assess within-product sophistication and both support the results. We further apply methods for estimation of across-product sophistication, which have never been used in this context before and these reinforce our main results.