Institutional development in new and potential member countries determines the success of both the catching-up of developing European countries and the deepening of the European integration process. This paper argues that the timing of future enlargement should depend on institutional...

This paper uses a Markov regime-switching model to assess the vulnerability of a series of Central and Eastern European countries (ie Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovak Republic) and two CIS countries (ie, Russia and Ukraine) during the period 1993–2004. For the new EU member states in Central...

We document that a persistent inflation differential has opened across different groups of transition economies since 2001, with the CIS-West seeing particularly high outcomes. We consider a range of non-monetary explanations discussed in the literature (economic structure, policy and...

We characterise optimal discretionary monetary policy responses to cost-push shocks and to financial distress in the presence of model uncertainty. Under robust control, the central bank reacts more aggressively to both types of shocks, and less to the lagged policy rate, than if the true model...