Russia's manufacturing sector was stagnant in late 2018; both state-supported industries and industries that profited from a positive global trend were on the rise. Data for early 2019 show growth in most of the manufacturing industries. Barring some industries (e.g., food and chemical industries...

All formerly centrally planned economies record very substantial declines in their social products. The largest drops in production are recorded in Poland and in east Germany (the former GDR), that is, in those countries where the most radical steps towards a market economy were taken in 1990....

In 1990 the privatisation debate in the ex-socialist countries advanced considerably. By now, the fundamental importance of private property for a market economy and the pitfalls of employee-ownership schemes are rarely disputed. Instead, the need for rapid privatisation and suitable methods of...

In recent years the problems of the indebtedness of the communist countries have been driven somewhat into the background by the high foreign indebtedness of many developing countries and the attention attracted by the balance of payments crises in Brazil and Mexico. Yet there are many...

Conventional wisdom suggests that the stocks of human capital were one of the few positive legacies from communism. However, if factories under communism were so inefficient, why would the education system not have been? Using the education production function approach and new data on...

This paper deals with the early stages of transformation of centrally-planned economies (CPEs) into market economies during which expectations play a key role. It focuses on the transitional phase during which the economy is not any more a CPE but has not yet become a market economy. During this...