Two data sets are used to study how country and firm characteristics affected firms' financial constraints and their likelihood of survival during the early phase of the recent global financial crisis in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a region that was especially hard hit. The first data...

In transition economies, enterprises that are even partly foreign-owned are twice as likely to have access to the Internet as state- and privately owned enterprises with no foreign ownership. And there is some evidence of spillovers, because enterprises that compete with foreign-owned domestic...

Many observers attributed the rapid productivity growth observed in the United States in the mid- to late 1990s, to the growing use of information, and the Internet. This in turn created concern that developing, and transition economies - where use of information technology, and the Internet was...