This paper provides an overview of public expenditures on education and healthcare in Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine and some other countries of the former Soviet Union before and during the global financial crisis. Before the crisis, the governments of these countries...

This manuscript examines the rapid spread of pension privatization and the flat tax in former communist countries in order to understand why new policy ideas take hold and to better understand the role played by material resources in the diffusion of new policy ideas. Unlike previous...

Attempts to explain why attempts at reform of post-Soviet agriculture following the demise of the Soviet commando-administrative economic system were so disappointing. Looks briefly at some of the obvious explanations: dependency on subsidies, inadequate physical and social infrastructure,...

As the Soviet Union dissolved into a new territorial reality, it released the doubly repressed histories of Tsarist and Soviet imperium. In the states to the south of the new Russian Federation, the post-soviet jostled with the postcolonial as nations were reinvented across a vast swathe from...

Why many transition economies succeeded by pursuing policies that are so different from the radical economic liberalization (shock therapy) that is normally credited for the economic success of central European countries? First, optimal policies are context dependent, they are specific for each...

In this paper the authors develop an innovative 21 sector computable general equilibrium model of Armenia to assess the impact on Armenia of a Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) with the EU, as well as further regional or multilateral trade policy commitments. The authors find...

Since the onset of the transformation process, there has been divergence in place as far as the speed and progress of institutional changes of the economies of the Former Soviet Union are concerned. Based on the thorough analysis of the EBRD data on attainments in institutional adjustment in...