The 2003 Energy review,contains information about the 2003 energy situation of each of our member countries, regional data, as well as economic and social indicators corrected and extended through historical series. It presents and innovative structure for analysis that allows the reader to...

Pension reform is now on the national agenda in most post-Soviet countries. These countries have highly informalized economies, which means that large areas of economic activity go unreported to the authorities. This paper deals with the problem of pension reform in a highly informalized...

The current consensus on indirect tax reform in developing countries favors a reduction in trade taxes with an increase in VAT to raise revenue. The theoretical results on selective reform that underlie this consensus are, however, derived from partial models that ignore the existence of an...

This paper presents a procedure for clustering analysis that combines Kohone’s Self organizing Feature Map (SOFM) and statistical schemes. The idea is to cluster the data in two stages: run SOFM and then minimize the segmentation dispersion. The advantages of proposed procedure will be...

The European Union and its Member States have been engaged in product market reforms over a long period with notable reforms including the Single Market Program and the Lisbon Agenda launched in March 2000. Product market reforms are seen as exerting both a direct and an indirect impact on...

While economists continue to debate whether individual economic policies, such as those contained in Willliamsons (1993) Washington Consensus, can help to spur growth in developing countries, this paper demonstrates that it is groups of policies that are more critical for growth. Policy...

Following up on a previous paper by the same author on the contribution of ICT capital to growth and labor productivity in Poland 1995-2000, this paper extends the study to eight transition economies: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia. The paper shows that...

There is large evidence on a positive impact of information and communication technologies (ICT) on economic growth and productivity in a number of developed countries in the 1990’s. There are however no studies, which would estimate the contribution of ICT to growth and productivity in...

This paper proposes a “before-and-after” approach to empirical examination of the relationship between democracy and growth. Rather than the commonly used cross-country regression method, this paper compares the economic performances of forty countries before and after they became...

Views of the future China vary widely. While some believe that the collapse of China is inevitable, others see the emergence of a new superpower that increasingly poses a threat to the U.S. This paper examines the economic growth prospects of China over the next two decades. Extrapolating past...