This paper analyses changes in the legal protection of shareholder and creditor rights in 24 transition economies from 1990 to 1998. It documents differences in the initial conditions and a tendency towards convergence of formal legal rules as the result of extensive legal reforms. Convergence...

The central European transition-accession countries experienced several periods of macroeconomic vulnerability since the end of output declines in early 1990s. Some notable periods, which resulted in a necessity to implement extensive stabilisation measures, are March 1995 in Hungary, May 1997...

Kazakhstan is at the forefront of power sector reform in the EBRD’s countries of operations. Starting in 1996, a regulator was set up, the industry was unbundled, some distribution and generation companies were privatised, and the large user market was liberalised. A number of reform...

We analyse the principal objectives and constraints of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), using data from a survey of 437 owners and top managers (CEOs) of SMEs in Russia and Bulgaria. The CEOs display similar views and identify a small number of specific constraints as being the most...

This paper analyses the results from a survey conducted in 1999 of more than 100 enterprises in Albania. The main finding of the survey is that registered businesses regard competition from the informal sector as the most important problem they face in doing business. Unregistered firms have a...

We study the nexus between enterprises and the state in transition countries, using new enterprise survey data. We examine the quality of governance, state intervention in enterprise decision-making, state benefits to firms and corruption payments. The quality of governance varies both across...

This paper investigates the relative importance of three sets of factors – initial conditions, macroeconomic stabilisation and structural reforms – as determinants of growth in transition economies during the first 10 years. The paper has two main results. First, average growth over the last...

Most countries commonly classified as ‘in transition’ are still recognisably different in some respects from other countries with a similar income per capita: a larger share of their workforce is in industry, they use more energy, they have a more extensive infrastructure and invest more in...

This paper reports the findings of a survey of more than 3,000 firms in 20 transition countries. It shows that barter and other non-monetary transactions (including the use of bills of exchange, debt swaps, barter chains, and the redemption of debt in goods) are an important phenomenon in Russia...

This paper offers a first comprehensive analysis of legal change in shareholder and creditor rights protection in transition economies and its impact on the propensity of firms to raise external finance. The paper uses the investor rights indices developed by La Porta et al. (1998) as a starting...