The importance of a country's 'investment climate' for economic growth has recently received much attention. In this paper we use a new survey of 1,500 Chinese enterprises in five cities to measure more precisely components of the investment climate and their effects on firm performance. Our...

This paper investigates the investment behaviour of a large panel of Hungarian firms in the period 1989-99, in order to assess the impact of institutional and regulatory changes on the efficiency of credit allocation. We find that the role of financial factors for investment decisions has...

Poor protection of private property has limited the access to bank loans by private enterprises in developing and transition economies. Under those circumstances, private entrepreneurs have resorted to various ways of enhancing the "de facto" protection of private property. Using a dataset of...

We analyse the internal spatial wage and employment structures of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia, using regional data for 1996-2000. A new economic geography model predicts wage gradients and specialization patterns that are smoothly related to the regions' relative...

We look at the differences in regional unemployment rates in six major transition countries and their persistence over time. We analyse the role various adjustment mechanisms play. While movement out of the labour force seems to be one consequence in many regions with high relative unemployment,...

We decompose real appreciation in tradables derived from producer price indexes in three Central European countries between the pricing-to-market component (disparity) and the local relative price component (the substitution ratio). Appreciation is only partially explained by local relative...