South Africa has achieved a lot on its path of socio-economic transformation since the end of Apartheid in 1994. While many challenges remain to foster inclusive growth to address the triple challenges of unemployment, poverty, and inequality, some innovative approaches have been used to build...

Despite a common parentage for most of the twentieth century, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan followed seemingly different paths in the transition to a market economy. Uzbekistan adopted a cautious, gradual approach to market reform, while Kazakhstan followed a more aggressive strategy. But has...

South Africa has achieved a lot on its path of socio-economic transformation since the end of Apartheid in 1994. While many challenges remain to foster inclusive growth to address the triple challenges of unemployment, poverty, and inequality, some innovative approaches have been used to build...

Transition literature has emphasized stabilization and enterprise restructuring. Both cross-country analyses and country-specific studies have tended to focus on fiscal stabilization and its indicators, highlighting the importance of quantitative fiscal adjustment to stabilization outcomes. Less...

The main objective of the Life in Transition Survey (LiTS) was to assess the impact of transition on people, and so the survey questionnaire covered four main themes. First, it collected personal information on aspects of material well-being, including household expenditures, possession of...

The analysis presented in this report assembles, for the first time, evidence from a variety of sources in the countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to show that policy and institutional reforms are important in achieving higher productivity growth. However, significant...

While the countries of Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union have made significant progress in reducing poverty in the past five years, poverty and vulnerability remain significant problems. More than 60 million are poor and more than 150 million are vulnerable. Growth, Poverty, and...

The policy reforms since 1983 have reduced the fiscal deficit and inflation, helped improve infrastructure services, and shifted relative prices and incentives towards the tradable sector, in general, and towards exports, in particular. The key element of fiscal consolidation up to 1991 was the...