This paper reviews the background and key policy challenges of the current situation of the Spanish economy. It describes the strengths and weaknesses of Spain’s recent long growth cycle, the real and financial imbalances accumulated towards its end, and the troubles faced at the current...

This Paper explores the sources of convergence in income per capita across the Spanish regions using a decomposition of this variable into employment and productivity factors and an estimate of a regional production function.

After presenting trends in aggregate performance within a comparative convergence framework, this paper explores institutional and macroeconomic features as the ultimate explanations of Spain's post-war growth performance. The following main phases are distinguished: the autarchy period...

Economic unification forced an unprecedented adjustment crisis on the East German economy. The revolutionary shock of the transformation of the economic order was reinforced by a real appreciation shock exceeding 50%, due to the immediate introduction of the Deutschmark. This paper examines in...

Eastern Europe is engaged in a massive programme of financial reform. This paper argues that while this programme has many desirable features, it has failed to address some of the most basic issues. These concern the relationship between the financial system and the enterprise sector, and the...

This paper analyses the ownership structure emerging from the Russian privatization process, using information from a sample survey of 439 state and privately-owned manufacturing companies conducted in July 1994, just after the voucher programme was completed. The Russian ownership structure...

A critical, but largely unexamined assumption in the debate over reform policy design, concerns the complementarity or substitutability of market competition and private ownership in increasing firm efficiency. We analyse a simple Cournot model that distinguishes two aspects of privatization...

The 'big-bang' liberalization of the inefficient Russian economy in 1992 provides a fruitful setting for analysing the impact of several dimensions of market competition and other factors on enterprise efficiency. We analyse 1992-1998 panel data on 14,961 enterprises covering 75 percent of...