The Orange Revolution in the fall of 2004 built great hopes for a better future for Ukraine. However, three years later those hopes have been replaced by disappointment, frustration and confusion. Although progress in the areas of political freedom, pluralism, civil rights and freedom in the...

In the 1990s, the CIS region experienced a painful transformation following the collapse of the USSR and the command economy. For the less developed republics of the former USSR, this process was even more dramatic as they lost subsidies from the Union's budget and some of them suffered...

This report is concerned with the analysis of privatization and private sector development for the eastern and southern Mediterranean countries partnered with the European Union and collectively known as MED-11. Noting that the analysis applies to the situation prior to the dislocations of the...

After a long period in which state-led development was the dominant economic paradigm, since the 1980s private sector development has been the focus for economic policy makers. It is probably no coincidence that economic growth, stagnant for a few decades in much of the developing world, took...

This paper studies costs and benefits of institutional harmonisation in the context of EU relations with its neighbors. The purpose of this paper is to outline the likely forms of institutional harmonisation between the EU and its Eastern neighbors and provide an overview of the methodologies...

Institutional harmonization is an important part of European integration, and its effects are more far reaching than the effects of trade liberalization. In its policy towards neighbors (the European Neighborhood Policy, ENP), the EU puts a lot of stress on the desirability of institutional...

This paper analyzes the costs of (partial) institutional harmonization with the EU acquis which countries of the former USSR are expected to conduct under their Partnership and Cooperation Agreements with the EU and European Neighborhood Policy Action Plans. The public sector will have to take...

During the last two decades the CIS countries have received very significant amounts of technical assistance from international development organizations and bilateral donors. While this has played a positive and important role in the transformation of these societies, practically all...

This study evaluates the effects of the current Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Agreement for the EU and the Mediterranean region, in order to assist policy makers in defining the next steps in the Euro-Mediterranean Road map till 2010 and beyond. It provides quantitative, qualitative and sectoral...

The first aim of this paper is to describe the main developments in the Ukrainian economy since its independence in 1991, focusing on the evolution of output, and the path of economic reforms — that is, to simply show what happened. The bottom line on that is well known: Ukraine’s economy...