Although the Visegrád Four countries often defended the same or similar positions in the European Convention, their views differed on many important issues. This situation is likely to be repeated at the upcoming Intergovernmental Conference. This basically confirms the tendency that can be...

The aim of the review is to summarise the achievements of Phare Roma programmes in the five countries where integration of Roma minorities was specified as an Accession Partnership priority (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia) and to consider to what extent they have...

Phare support to SME development has mainly consisted of technical assistance and advisory services to national institutions, support to SME policy and legislative development and financial support for SME development. Progress has been made in tackling problems inherited from the past, as well...

This ex post evaluation addresses the EU/EC’s pre-accession assistance provided to the twelve countries that acceded to the European Union as part of the ‘fifth wave’ of EU enlargement, i.e. Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia...

This paper exploits the rapid rise in self-employment rates in post-communist Eastern Europe as a valuable ?quasi-experiment? for understanding the sources of entrepreneurship. A relative demand-supply model and an individual sectoral choice model are used to analyze a 1993 survey of 27,000...

We use longitudinal methods and universal panel data on 30,000 initially state-owned manufacturing firms in four transition economies to estimate the impacts of privatization on employment and wages. The results in all four countries consistently reject job losses and they never imply large wage...

While a variety of studies analysed the benign effects of privatisation on firm performance under post-socialist transition using financial data very little is known about how the apparent productivity gains were achieved. This paper follows a weaving mill from 1998 to 1997 on its way of...

The debate on the privatization of enterprises in Eastern Europe often presumes that enterprises are still controlled by an identifiable entity called "the state". This, however, is no longer the case. Since the demise of tight central planning, the nominally state-owned enterprises are de facto...