Around the turn of the century, China experienced perhaps the largest labour restructuring program in the world. This paper uses a new dataset of Chinese industrial enterprises to examine what leads to downsizing, and tries to understand the effects of labour downsizing on firms' technical...

In Eastern Germany, wage differentiation between firms has clearly grown, parallel to individual wage differentials. Nevertheless, the wage spread between firms is still much less than in Western Germany. In this paper, a non-parametric decomposition is used to analyze the difference between the...

We analyze the role of debt in corporate governance with respect to a large emerging economy, India, where debt has been an important source of external finance. Using cross-sectional data on listed manufacturing firms we estimate, simultaneously, the relation between Tobin's Q and leverage for...

Social capital is considered to play an economic role in labour markets. It may be particularly pertinent in one that is in transition from an administered to a market-oriented system. One factor that may determine success in the underdeveloped Chinese labour market is thus "guanxi", the Chinese...

After three decades of market development, the problem in China is no longer how to achieve growth but how to manage its consequences and how to sustain it. One of the most important consequences is the growing inequality - between skilled and unskilled workers, between the genders, between...

In this paper, we look at the role of export composition in the growth process, considering how increased similarity in trade structure among countries can induce catching-up in income levels in a group of countries in transition. We analyze the sectoral export patterns of the Central and...

We examined the implementation statuses of a total of 5,919 foreign direct investment (FDI) projects approved by the Vietnamese Ministry of Planning and Investment since 1988, and compiled a database of actually disbursed FDI in Vietnam. The database covers FDI flows into Vietnam from 23...

This article shows that mark-ups are significantly higher in South African manufacturing industries than they are in corresponding industries worldwide. We test for the consequences of this low-level of product market competition on productivity growth. The results of the paper are that high...

This paper empirically investigates the link between political patronage and bank performance for Ukraine during 2003Q3-2005Q2. We find significant differences between politically affiliated and non-affiliated banks. The data suggest that affiliated banks have significantly lower interest rate...

This paper provides evidence on factors driving productivity growth in the new EU member states, focusing on Polish manufacturing industries. The results obtained indicate that companies in Poland benefit significantly from transfer of technologies accumulated in more developed economies. No...