Transition was never going to be easy, even if the long-run outlook is highly promising. Not only was the process itself a major theoretical and policy challenge but, inevitably, politics and economics were bound to interfere. With some spectacular exceptions, most countries are now on the right...

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...

Germany is generally regarded as the nominal anchor for Europe. Its participation is the sine qua non of EMU. It has been the largest net contributor to EU finances, the leading proponent of greater economic and political union, and the leading example of the virtues of fiscal and monetary...

Disposable income inequality, as measured by the Gini coefficient and using Family Budget Survey data, increased very little, and by a similar amount, from 1989–93 in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. This surprising result is examined with an analysis of changes in the channels of...

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...

This paper proposes an explanation of the puzzling coexistence of elements of inertia and dynamism on the Russian labour market using a segmentation model. Risk averse workers are differentiated according to their productivity. They face a trade-off between wages and access to social services...

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...