Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Romanian rural economy has undergone massive changes. Increased urban unemployment has stimulated migration from towns to rural areas. Meanwhile, rural industries that were subsidised under communism have collapsed, causing rural unemployment....

The aims of this study are to improve understanding of the dynamics of the rural non-farm economy in providing employment and income diversification opportunities in Armenia, Georgia and Romania. The study aims to focus on improving the well-being and livelihoods of the rural population, through...

In this paper the findings of a survey conducted in June 2001 in Armenia are summarised. The aim was to gain insight into the nature of the rural non-farm economy (RNFE) in the country. For that purpose, 21 rural communities in 3 regions (called marzes in Armenian) were non-randomly selected....

In this paper an effort has been made to unveil some hidden and implicit assumptions that has been used in different models dealing with analysis and measurement of contribution of human capital to economic growth. In order to do it we started from the general production function with...

The radical changes that have occurred in the Romanian economy during the last decade have created new pressures on the country’s rural areas. Increasing industrial unemployment generated an urban-rural migratory flow of the population. The collapse of the agri-industrial processing and...

This paper focuses on the question of income convergence among countries. While the methodology used to determine convergence differs from the common cross-sectional approach, it corroborates Baumol's finding of a convergence club among the world's wealthiest countries. It also shows that there...

This paper examines why some transitions are more successful than others by focusing attention on the role of productive, protective and predatory behaviors from the perspective of the new institutional economics. Many transition economies are characterized by a fundamental inconsistency between...

This paper examines the relationship between trade and income convergence by focusing on groups of countries comprising major trade partners. The majority of these groups exhibited significant convergence. Furthermore, a comparison of the trade-based groups with different, randomly selected,...

Many countries, both industrialized and developing, appear to have experienced a slowdown in economic growth. We examine a large sample of countries and find that a majority exhibit a significant structural break in their post-war growth rates. In nearly all of these cases the break was followed...

It is widely acknowledged that underground (unrecorded) economic activities play a major role in transition economies. Evaluations of the success and failure of the transition experience should therefore be based on total economic activity [TEA], namely, the sum of recorded and unrecorded...