"The paper evaluates the effects of privatization in the post-communist economies and China. In post-communist economies privatization to foreign owners results in a rapid improvement in performance of firms, while performance effects of privatization to domestic owners are less impressive and...

"This paper uses firm-level data from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Surveys to study the process of convergence of transition countries with developed market economies. The study focuses on competition and market structure, finance and the structure of lending to firms, and...

"Major changes have occurred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment, and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services...

"Drawing on the recent literature on economic institutions and the origins of economic development, the authors offer a political economy explanation of why institution building has varied so much across transition economies. They identify dependence on natural resources and the historical...

This book reviews the experience with one specific though widely introduced approach to funding general education, namely per capita financing (PCF), in six countries in the Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region in an effort to learn which outcomes were achieved and how. Per capita financing is a...

This note is part of a series that considers the linkages between of Community Driven Development (CDD) and urban operations. The objective of this note is to identify the role of CDD in the housing sector in transition economies, to highlight the varied CDD approaches that have been used thus...

"The authors develop and implement a method for measuring the frequency of changes in power among distinct leaders and ideologically distinct parties that is comparable across political systems. The authors find that more frequent alternation in power is associated with the emergence of better...