This paper examines the effects of transition and of political instability on foreign direct investment (FDI) flows to the transition economies of Central Europe, the Baltics and the Balkans. We find that FDI flows to transition economies unaffected by conflict and political instability exceed...

The Vietnamese privatization programme, launched in 1992, differs from the usual Western privatization programmes in terms of the residual percentage of shares owned by the state and the portion of shares owned by insiders. This begs the question whether these differences influence the effects...

Using a representative sample of medium and large firms, this paper explores the process of employment and wage bill determination in the Bulgarian manufacturing sector. The results suggest that, during 1997-2001, the labour market behaviour of these firms was consistent with weakly efficient...

The study examines the changes of the Central Eastern European region first in the context of world history. It confirms by comparative historical analyses that the transformation was indeed unique. This has been the only total transformation that took place peacefully, without violence, and at...

This paper develops a model to investigate the welfare implications of barter in Russia and other transition economies during the 1990s. We argue that barter is a welfare-improving phenomenon that acts as a defence mechanism against monetary instability. When firms react to tighter credit...

This paper examines how market entry and privatization have affected the margins and marginal costs of banks in the post-communist transition. We estimate bank revenue and cost functions, allowing the estimated parameters to change over time. In the first sub-period (1995-98), we find that...

The concept of the neutral rate of interest has recently received much attention from economists. In this paper, we estimate the neutral rate of interest in Poland. We show how it can yield important information for a central banker. In particular, estimation of the neutral rate can be helpful...

Although much has been written about annual income inequality in China, little research has been conducted on longer-run measures of income inequality and on income mobility. This paper compares income mobility of urban individuals in China and the United States in the 1990s. The following...

In the 1990s - during the restructuring of large state enterprises - Central European economies experienced high unemployment. Social policy expenditures, particularly targeted to the non-employed, grew faster than expected due to the need to finance the "out-of-the-labour" categories. In 1992,...

An easy and popular method for measuring the size of the underground economy is to use macro data such as money demand or electricity demand to infer what the legitimate economy needs, and then to attribute the remaining consumption to the underground economy. Such inferences rely on the...