East Germany remains unique among the transition economies. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, it became part of the Federal Republic of Germany. German Union meant the transplantation of West Germany's legal, administrative and economic infrastructure to the five new Länder. The...

The adjustment of labour markets during transition has been quite different from that anticipated by the Optimal Speed of Transition (OST) literature. In particular, it has involved stagnant unemployment pools, large flows to inactivity and strikingly low workers' mobility especially when...

An ‘efficiency wage’ model developed for Western economies is reinterpreted for Soviet Russia assuming that it was the Gulag not unemployment that acted as a ‘worker-discipline device’. Archival data now available allows for a basic account of the dynamics of the Gulag to be estimated....

Contrary to the claim of Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny (1994), it is conceivable under market socialism to take firms out of the orbit of state control and that a less narrow theory of the state than theirs allows the possibility of democratic socialism mitigating problems of economic...

The transition to a market economy in Bulgaria is a complex process that requires the privatisation of the economy. But, privatisation is not enough. Transition means a deep institutional change that has to do with the transformation of the behaviour economic agents. This article analyses the...

Why have economic reforms aimed at reducing the role of the state been successful in some cases but not others? Are reform failures the consequence of leviathan states that hinder private economic activity, or of weak states unable to implement policies effectively and provide a supportive...

The North Korean economy has been a statistical black hole for decades but is undergoing substantial transformations. Rapid post-war industrialisation was not sustained beyond the mid-1960s and South Korea’s economy far outpaced North Korea’s during the next three decades, during which trend...

In 1997 GDP per capita in East Germany was 57% of that of West Germany, wage rates were 75% of western levels, and the unemployment rate was at least double the western rate of 7.8%. One would expect that if capital flows and trade in goods failed to bring convergence, labor flows would respond,...

This paper takes stock of informal employment in Russia analysing its incidence and determinants. Using the regular 2003-11 waves and an informality supplement of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (RLMS) it develops several measures of informal employment and demonstrates that the...

Inequality in access to education is known to be a key driver of income inequality in developing countries. Viet Nam, a transitional economy, exhibits significant segmentation in the market for skilled labor based on more remunerative employment in government and state firms. We ask whether this...