The radical liberalization of foreign trade in Central and Eastern Europe since 1989 has been a key part of the economic reform and has been accompanied by a full-scale geographical reorientation of international trade from East to West. Increased trade with the EU has been associated with...

The two central economic problems facing Hungary are its large foreign debt and its relatively poor rate of growth over the 1980s. The paper examines some of the reform issues facing Hungary, starting with the tax reforms of 1988 and 1989, but concentrating on the importance of creating...

China’s economic reforms have resulted in spectacular growth and poverty reduction. However, China’s institutions look ill-suited to achieve such a result, and they indeed suffer from serious shortcomings. To solve "China puzzle" this paper analyses China’s institution - a regionally...

Unlike most cross-country growth analyses, we focus on turning points in growth performance. We look for instances of rapid acceleration in economic growth that are sustained for at least eight years and identify more than 80 such episodes since the 1950s. Growth accelerations tend to be...

What is the impact of movement towards free trade on output? Can this impact permanently affect output levels, and more importantly, will it have an impact on steady-state growth rates? This paper provides empirical evidence showing how countries have exhibited substantial increases in their...

After presenting trends in aggregate performance within a comparative convergence framework, this paper explores institutional and macroeconomic features as the ultimate explanations of Spain's post-war growth performance. The following main phases are distinguished: the autarchy period...

This research explores the origins of the distribution of time preference across regions. It advances the hypothesis, and establishes empirically, that geographical variations in natural land productivity and their impact on the return to agricultural investment have had a persistent effect on...

This paper investigates how telecommunications infrastructure affects economic growth. This issue is important and has received considerable attention in the popular press concerning the creation of the 'information superhighway' and its potential impacts on the economy. We use evidence from 21...

Assuming that economic reforms are successful in Eastern Europe, what will be the effects on Western Europe? The focus is on the wage pressure that the threat of migration from East to West is likely to impose. The paper adopts a Ramsey model of intertemporal choice, for both individuals and...

How does the relationship between earnings and schooling change with the introduction of comprehensive economic reform? This Paper uses a unique dataset (covering about 3 million Hungarian wage earners, from 1986 to 1998) and a novel procedure to correct sample selection bias (based on DiNardo,...