The paper analyses the role of currency convertibility in the process of economic transition in Eastern Europe and discusses alternative institutional options for achieving this difficult task. It shows that an early transition to convertibility is an indispensable requirement for the success of...

This paper studies how the creation of a European Central Bank (ECB) will change the political economy of monetary policy in Europe. The 12 governors of the EC member countries national central banks of the EEC have recently proposed a statute which delineates the institutional structure of the...

This paper studies the relationship between political conflict and economic growth in a simple model of endogenous growth with distributive conflicts. We study both the case of two `classes' (workers and capitalists) and the case of a continuum distribution of agents, characterized by their...

Transition to the market in Eastern Europe will require a great deal of restructuring of production involving the contraction and even closure of certain branches and the expansion of others, including some new ones. In the course of this, many enterprises will have to be shut down....

The paper discusses the long-run pattern of growth that characterized Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland over the 1970s and 1980s and also shows the immediate impact of the dramatic developments of the last year and a half upon industrial production, investment and employment including...

This paper uses cointegration techniques to assess the extent to which the behaviour of private- and public-sector savings and investment and those of the nation as a whole have been consistent with long-term solvency over the last three decades. In addition, an attempt is made to analyse...

We extend the `rational partisan model' of inflation and unemployment by introducing inflation and unemployment dynamics. We investigate the case of Greece, which has had a polarized political system and a problem of persistently high inflation in the last two decades. High inflation can be...

In this paper we investigate the role of credit institutions in transmitting monetary shocks to the domestic economy and to the output of the rest of the world. In modelling the monetary and financial sector of the economy we distinguish between monetary injections that take place via lump-sum...

This paper presents a simplified model of sectoral restructuring in Eastern Europe. A move towards allocative efficiency is desired by the reform-minded government, but the shift to higher productivity which such efficiency requires would lead to massive layoffs and labour reallocation in the...

The principal argument of the paper is that in an incomplete information setting, where the private sector lacks information on goverment objectives and has to learn about the policy rule by direct observation and estimation, simple `sub-optimal' rules may outperform the more complicated rule...