Before the transition governments had strong distributional objectives, which they pursued mainly by direct controls over state enterprise wage rates and hiring decisions, yielding a highly compressed wage distribution. During the reform they maintained similar controls over state enterprises,...

We have conducted the first survey on management practices in transition countries. We found that Central Asian transition countries, such as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, have on average very poor management practices. Their average scores are below emerging countries such as Brazil, China and...

Major changes have occurred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services...

In this Paper we present an overview of a number of issues relating to the equilibrium exchange rates of the new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe. In particular, we present a critical overview of the various methods available for calculating equilibrium exchange rates and discuss...

This Paper examines the consequences of interactions between the bank lending channel and the traditional interest rate and exchange rate channels on the effectiveness of the monetary policy transmission in Poland since 1994. First, we develop a small open-economy credit-augmented model. Under...

In their privatization programs, transition governments have frequently given away shares (so-called `mass privatization'), while maintaining significant minority ownership. We explain the rationality of these policies for an expected net-revenue maximizing government. Our argument rests on a...