This paper attempts the following two questions, both with reference to the response of the Polish economy to the stabilization and liberalization plan of January 1, 1990: why was the fall in output much larger and the inflation rate much higher than anticipated? Was the contraction of aggregate...

Pension systems and, as ratios of GDP, pension expenditures show large variation among countries. This variation reflects, above all, demographic factors and differences in the level of insurance protection, the latter tending to increase with the level of development. The focus of this paper is...

The principal novelty of this paper lies in offering explanations of changing priorities and of the stop-go-stop sequence of policies in Poland in the years 1990-1991. The paper suggests that, in the first year of the reform, achieving price stability was secondary to the following three other...

In this paper we develop a new model of growth accounting and use it to analyse the long-term growth of the US and the USSR. The technique is designed to capture the indirect or "feedback" contributions of technological change and labour input growth. These indirect contributions arise from the...

This paper discusses the key hypotheses which Joseph Stiglitz proposed, in his wide-ranging critique of the 'Washington Consensus', with regard to transition reforms and economic polices in China and Russia. The primary purpose is to evaluate the Stiglitz perspective in the light of empirical...

The paper discusses the reasons for the observed variation in the sequencing, speed and content of reform policies, in the 1990s, among 25 post-socialist countries of Central Europe and the Former Soviet Union. It argues that these differences, while considerable in the early 1990s, did not...

This paper tracks the rise in the percentage of employees who have never become union members (¿nevermembers¿) since the early 1980s and shows that it is the reduced likelihood of ever becoming a member rather than the haemorrhaging of existing members which is behind the decline in overall...

This paper examines the ongoing changes in strategy, structure, and performance of the largest 250 non-financial firms in both Britain and Germany. To this end, publicly available firm-level data is presented at first and supplemented by the results of a questionnaire survey that was sent to the...

Firms' decisions about which goods to produce are often made at a more disaggregate level than the data observed by empirical researchers. When products differ according to production technique or the way in which they enter demand, this data aggregation problem introduces a bias into standard...

We compare the economic consequences and political feasibility of reforms aimed at reducing barriers to entry (deregulation) and improving contractual enforcement (legal reform). Deregulation fosters entry, thereby increasing the number of firms (entrepreneurship) and the average quality of...