This paper looks at the link between the quality of economic institutions and innovation, and innovation and growth. We construct a measure of the innovation content of individual manufacturing industries and show that countries with stronger economic institutions specialise in more...

Countries in the Western Balkans – Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, FYR Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia – all aspire to membership of the European Union, but they face a major convergence challenge in terms of living standards. The main reason behind this prosperity gap lies in the...

This paper compares the effects of management practices and innovation on productivity, using data from the fifth round of the EBRD-WB Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey, a unique firm-level survey covering 30 mostly developing countries in eastern Europe and Central Asia in...

Private growth and investment in most of central, eastern and south-eastern Europe (CESEE) is still hampered by persistent financial distress in the corporate sector, resulting from the excessive debt taken on before the 2008 crisis. This paper looks at how this excess leverage affects firm...

Non-performing loans (NPLs) are a burden for both lender and borrower; they contract credit supply, distort allocation of credit, worsen market confidence and slow economic growth. So what is the best way to deal with them? This paper compares three different scenarios: actively reducing NPLs,...

Most prior work on sexual orientation and labour market earnings has relied either on individual-level surveys with small samples of sexual minorities or has used large samples of same-sex couples. We use a large individual-level dataset that allows us to measure both constructs. We replicate...

Since the collapse of communism, Poland has distinguished itself as one of the best performing economies in the European Union. However, the recent deceleration in growth has raised concerns about a “middle income trap”. Poland ranks among the lowest in the European Union on various measures...

In this paper we look at how much of a burden the business environment can place on firms. For the first time, the BEEPS V round of business environment surveys conducted in 2012-14 included a question asking managers to predict their cost reductions if a range of obstacles to their operation...

Using the responses in the latest round of the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) of approximately 1,800 business owners and senior managers in the Western Balkans, this paper examines the linkages between firm performance and perceived obstacles to doing business. We...

In this paper we provide an outline for viewing the middle-income trap through the lens of the Schumpeterian growth paradigm, which places the notion of creative destruction at the centre of economic growth. Economic growth and development come from structural transformation, which is the...