This paper provides new evidence on progress in transition and the 'readiness' of enterprises for accession to the EU using a detailed survey administered to approximately 200 manufacturing firms in each of Poland, Romania and Spain. A major innovation is the use of a market economy and member...

This paper takes the form of a comparative study of the body of research upon enterprise performance and restructuring in established market economies and transition economies (TEs). We firstly examine issues related to empirical studies of enterprise performance and restructuring, including the...

Using a firm level dataset from four regions of Russia covering 1996/97, an investigation was carried out into how the surplus created within the firm is divided between profits and wages. An efficient bargaining framework based on the work of Svejnar (1986) is employed which takes into account...

We take a retrospective look at Hungary's experiment with a particularly draconian bankruptcy law. For an eighteen-month period in 1992-93, the Hungarian bankruptcy code contained an unusual automatic trigger that required the managers of firms that held overdue debts of any size to any creditor...

This paper first examines various definitions of Kornai's soft budget constraint (SBC) and the difficulties involved in interpreting data on losses, subsidies and financing, and then considers selective evidence from transition economies. Stocks of overdue trade credit are no larger than in...

This article uses data on 27,000 firms from 50 countries, half of which are transition economies, together with the specific case of Serbia to examine the relationship between productivity, the investment climate and private ownership of firms. As government capacity to address the investment...

We use personnel data from a Russian firm for the years 1997 to 2002 to study the determinants of wages during transition. Our findings indicate that remuneration is not predetermined by formal rules and a stable institutionalized structure of wages, but rather that local labor market conditions...

Russia is already a major trading partner of the West, especially the EU, exporting mostly energy sources (gas and oil), metal, minerals and timber, while importing a wider range of manufactured products. In the longer term, Russian manufacturing is likely to start recovering and hence Russia...

In this paper there is a investigation of Ukraine’s contradictory attitude to reform. This attitude has seen the country characterised by hesitancy on reforms which has stifled its economic performance in areas such as privatisation and competition policy. Most notably the presence of interest...

It is argued that the impact of privatisation should be seen on company performance and productivity. The effects of "levelling the playing field" between the old state sector (whether or not now privatised) and new entrants to the industry will also be considered. Privatisation, in the sense of...