In the 30 years since the fall of communism, the countries of the former Soviet bloc and Yugoslavia have undergone tremendous change. Income per capita at purchasing power parity more than tripled in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia. All seven...

This paper presents evidence from 29 postcommunist countries that the economic transition has been more successful than the political transformation in the quarter century since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The adoption of strong parliamentarian systems has countered the adverse effects of...

We show that the economic transition has been more successful than the political transformation in the quarter century since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The adoption of strong parliamentarian systems has negated the deleterious effects of religious and imperial history on economic evolution. As...

Instead of focusing on hard-core anticompetitive behavior, between 1991 and 1995, Bulgaria's Commission for the Protection of Competition tended to deal with unfair trade practices and contract enforcement problems. Remedies for egregious violations of the law were not dire enough to pressure...

Poor results from the isolation program for financially distressed firms in Romania suggest that enterprise restructuring under government auspices does not work - that transition economies should privatize rapidly, without attempting first to restructure enterprises. How should countries in...

Enterprises in six newly independent states exhibit large differences in ownership structure, differences that seem to be determined by the method of privatization pursued. Enterprises in countries where the privatization programs favored incumbent managers ended up with heavy ownership by...

We study the effects of trade barriers and the persistence of past linkages on trade flows in the former Soviet Union (FSU). Estimating a gravity equation on 1987-1996 trade among and between nine Russian regions and fourteen FSU republics, we find that Russian regions traded 60 percent more...

This paper is a study of the economic effects of the integration of the Central European Countries (CECs) into the European Union (EU). Our analysis of EU-CEC integration is based on a specially constructed version of the University of Michigan Computational General Equilibrium (CGE) Trade...