This Technical Paper is a study of the working of urban credit cooperatives in China. It begins by putting the German, French, US and Japanese experiences into perspective, before constructing a macroeconomic analysis of the operation, institutional context and the role of urban credit...

The effects of the minimum wage on employment in Western economies are relatively uncontroversial. The introduction of a minimum wage in Czechoslovakia at the start of the transition, and its increase one year later, gives the opportunity to evaluate to what extent its effects on employment seem...

This paper uses Markov-switching techniques to examine the presence of different market conditions on the Shanghai A-share market since the start of active trading in the mid-1990s. The originality of the paper lies in the identification of three contrasting regimes: a speculative market, a bull...

In this paper, we establish a turning point chronology for the Chinese provincial deviation cycles during the period 1989–2009. The existing work has exclusively focused on the national business cycle.

Potential new entrants to the European Union from Central and Eastern European countries face many challenges to achieve financial convergence with the existing EU nations. Using detailed case studies from Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland and analysis of cross country...