In light of the profound changes that both the European economy and European politics have experienced since the global financial crisis of 2008, this policy paper intends to retrace the experience of Central, Eastern and Southeastern European (CESEE) countries with transition and catching-up...

This study examines the link between economic complexity and environmental quality by exploiting the similar starting points of the former socialist transition countries after the fall of the iron curtain. We refer to the extended theories of the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC), stating that...

In developing and transition economies as much as half the labor force works in the informal sector (or "shadow economy"). Informal firms congest infrastructure and other public services but do not contribute the taxes needed to finance them. Informal workers are unprotected against such...

High levels of economic inequality may lead to lower economic growth and can have negative social and political impacts. Recent empirical research shows that income and wealth inequalities in Eastern Europe since the fall of socialism increased significantly more than previously suggested....

An extensive program of economic liberalization reforms, even when it generates positive outcomes, does not automatically generate support for further reforms. Societies respond with strong support only after experiencing the effects of reversing these reforms (i.e. corruption, inequality of...

This study explored the linkage between financial development, human resources, and economic growth in a group of twenty-five transition countries during the period 1995-2019. The author applied a range of estimations such as Ordinary Least Squares (OLS), fixed effects model, and two-step GMM...

Recent research shows that natural resources can hurt institutions by promoting corruption and diverting resources from the production of public goods. This, in turn, may have implications for the trust individuals hold for their governments. We explore this possibility by linking survey data on...

The economic indicators of the new member states of the EU that joined after 2004 have been generally positive. In this paper, we analyse and interpret the economic development results of the 11 new Member States from the Eastern bloc. The set of individual economic indicators gives us a...

European emerging and transition economies are in immense need of investments and renewal of capital, yet they produce a considerable amount of unutilized resources. In particular, banks hold excess liquidity in the face of seemingly profitable lending opportunities. Is it a demand-side or...

This paper presents an analysis of the welfare convergence among 27 transition economies based on the evaluation of a micro-based summary statistic combining income, consumption, leisure, life expectancy, and inequality (Jones & Klenow, 2016). The results show that the countries of the former...

The rise and fall of the Soviet Union and the communist empire was one of the distinguishing events of the twentieth century. The 21 countries that made up the Warsaw Pact simultaneously made a transition from Communism to more market-based economic systems. These countries all shared a common...

The paper deals with the problems of diverging developmental trajectories of former Socialist economies of the Central and South-Eastern European countries as well as of the former USSR republics. The purpose is exploring the developmental trends of three groups of economies - ECE, Balkans and...

The subject of this paper is a critique of the quasi-neoliberal violence of alternative institutions, which are the most problematic and most threatening brake phenomenon of transition. They have been produced, strengthened and reproduced by the authorities of most post-socialist countries in...

The electricity prices in developing countries are relatively low to recover its costs of generation and provision. This results in under-investment in infrastructure, which usually leads to frequent outages or rolling blackouts by the electricity suppliers. Outages may have an adverse impact on...

This paper contrasts International Social Science Programme (ISSP) surveys for Hungary, supplemented with related survey data for East Germany, Poland, and Slovenia, with ISSP data for Western countries, to examine the extent to which workers in traditionally communist societies differ in their...

When Russia launched mass privatization, it was widely believed that it would create a powerful constituency for the rule of law. That didn't happen. We present a dynamic equilibrium model of the political demand for the rule of law and show that beneficiaries of mass privatization may fail to...

Post-communist countries offer new evidence on the relative importance of courts and relationships in enforcing contracts. Belief in the effectiveness of courts has a significant positive effect on the level of trust shown in new relationships between firms and their customers. Well-functioning...

The main purpose of this study is to explore the determinants of information and communication technology (ICT) implementation and use in organizations in transition economies. The study is based on research conducted among 129 enterprise system (ES) adopters in Poland, an example of a...

The formation of a market economy is a very complex issue due to the transformation and change of the system that has developed over many decades. The problem of an economy in transition is an important issue in the modern reality of many countries and the world economy in general. The renewed...

This paper examines alternative hypotheses concerning the determinants of success in the transition from Communism to the market. In particular, we look at whether speed of privatization, legal institutions or initial conditions are more important in explaining the growth of the transition...

This paper seeks to document and analyze changes in the distribution of wages and employment in the transition countries since the collapse of communism. Most countries experienced an increase in wage inequality during the initial shock of the transition. Proximate causes of this increase seem...

Ten years after the start of transition, there are many puzzles we still have to live with. Why did all countries experience strong declines in output at the outset of economic transformations and most of them are slowly, if at all, recovering from this "transitional recession"? How can these...

Differences in regional unemployment in post-communist economies are large and persistent. We show that inherited variation in human-capital endowment across the regions of four such economies explains the bulk of regional unemployment variation there and we explore potential explanations for...

Why do banks remain passive? In a model of bank-firm relationship we study the trade-off a bank faces when having defaulting firms declared bankrupt. First, the bank receives a payoff if a firm is liquidated. Second, it provides information about a firm's type to its competitors. Thereby,...

Does fractionalization change over time? If so, are there any substantial implications for economic performance? To answer such questions, we construct a new panel data set with fractionalization measures for 26 former communist countries covering the period from 1989 to 2002. Our...

Conventional wisdom suggests that lobbying is the preferred mean for exerting political influence in rich countries and corruption the preferred one in poor countries. Analyses of their joint effects are understandably rare. This paper provides a theoretical framework that focus on the...

Analysis on macroeconomic determinants of protection in the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, and Poland, while subject to many caveats, suggests that appreciation of the real exchange rate was the main macroeconomic determinant of trade policy reversals in the 1990s. This suggests that...

Recent studies have highlighted the adverse impact of corruption on economic performance. This paper advances the hypothesis that corruption is largely a symptom of underlying weaknesses in public policies and institutions, a formulation that provides deeper insights into economic performance...