The paper compares the experience with shock therapies in East Germany, Poland and the CSFR. After an analysis of the individual starting conditions and economic performance since the inception of comprehensive reform programmes it focuses on the specific elements of the East German reform...

This paper analyzes performance of the transition economies in the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries in terms of their convergence in selected macroeconomic fundamentals. The analysis uses monthly data on industrial output, money aggregate (M1), consumer prices and producer prices...

A microeconomic theoretical model shows that two factors - the compensation and progressivity effects - produce the shifting (if any) of tax rates on wage formation. From an analytical viewpoint, they may be positive or negative and of equal or different sign. A microfounded nested macroeconomic...

Difficulties in European fiscal harmonization will mainly depend on present inter-country differences in effective rather than scheduled tax rates and tax structures. This paper therefore tries to evaluate the historical and current heterogeneities and similarities which characterize not only de...

The paper examines the optimal level of training investment when trained workers are mobile, wage contracts are time-consistent, and training comprises both specific and general skills. It is shown that, in the absence of a social planner, the firm has ex-post monopsonistic power that drives...

The main questions addressed in this paper are: First, how did labour markets in the Visegrad countries react to the breakdown of a command economy and the transformation to a market economy? Second, which way ahead is likely, or to put it differently, what should be done now to improve...

Differences in the rate of population growth between developed and developing countries have potentially important implications for patterns of trade, migration, and the distribution of the gains from economic activity, both within and between nations. This paper focuses on migration-related...

This paper offers new tests of the `convergence hypothesis'. It first analyses the pattern of growth of measured inputs (human and physical capital conventionally measured by an inventory method) and shows that these tests sustain the hypothesis. On the other hand, when the pattern of growth of...

Under communism, workers had their wages set according to a centrally-determined wage grid. In this paper we use new micro data on men to estimate returns to human capital under the communist wage grid and during the transition to a market economy. We use data from the Czech Republic because it...

Many writers have claimed that R&D has two 'faces'. In addition to the conventional role of stimulating innovation, R&D enhances technology transfer by improving the ability of firms to learn about advances in the leading edge ('absorptive capacity'). In this paper we document that there has...