In the former communist countries, institutional change, i.e. transition towards market economy, is affected not only by introduction of law and formal institutions (change "by design"), but also by social norms, old values and habits (informal institutions). I present an empirical paper...

The paper addresses the problem of similarities and divergence of transition paths at the later stage of transition in the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States. The main aim is to clarify the influence of specifics of government-business relations on economic reforms carried out...

This paper empirically analyses overall specialization and revealed comparative advantages of the South Mediterranean countries. The paper has been divided into two sections. The first section deals with the relation between overall specialization and per-capita income, through a semi-parametric...

This paper examines the issue of tax evasion by enterprises through underreporting activity. We develop a view of this phenomenon as an equilibrium of the game between a businessman and an imperfectly monitored supervising official, in which a businessman can hide part of his profit and offer...

In recent decades, the international division of labor has expanded rapidly in the wake of European integration. In this context, especially Western European high-wage countries should have specialized on (human-)capital intensively manufactured goods and should have increasingly sourced...

The paper analyses the new trend of outward foreign direct investment (FDI) by multinational companies from emerging countries, in particular the BRICs, in developed countries to question the applicability of the traditional HOS theoretical framework to this trend. A literature review shows that...

Given the wide use of economic freedom in economic literature it is imperative to understand how economic freedom evolves. Results suggest that levels of economic freedom are dominated by random shocks. Using a test for stationarity devised by Westerlund and Larsson (2012) we are unable to...

This paper analyses the out-of-sample forecasting performance of non-linear vs. linear models for the South African rand against the United States dollar and the British pound, in real terms. We compare the forecasting performance of point, interval and density forecasts for non-linear Band-TAR...

In this paper we investigate the relationship between education and completed fertility decisions at couple level for some EU countries. For this purpose we control for demographic, social and economic conditions, by using the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) dataset. In order to handle...

The paper investigates specialization and agglomeration trends in EU-27 NUTS2 regions over 1991-2011 by means of two versions of the relative Theil indicator that use employment data. The paper’s main focus is on Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) regions. As a legacy of central...