The Coasean way to deal with the cooperation failure that is implicit in Pareto inefficiency is to remove or lessen the obstacles to cooperation through the attribution of property rights and the elimination or reduction of transaction costs. The relevance of this approach is however undermined...

In this paper, we examine net investment during the early stages of transition using micro data on the population of medium and large industrial firms in the Czech Republic during the 1992-95 period. We examine the relevance of alternative models of investment and test if investment behavior...

Growth regressions have provided important insights into the impact of economic reforms on growth in transition economies. Using principal components to decompose reform variables and construct reform clusters, we address unsettled issues such as the importance of sequencing and reform speed....

Just when China’s leaders receive conflicting signals of “overheating” and “below-potential growth”, they encounter tremendous external pressure to revalue the Renminbi (RMB) substantially. Our conclusion is that the major macroeconomic challenges have their roots in China’s...

The economic performance of Vietnam in the 1990s would be classified as a “miracle” if such achievements were not so common in Asia in the latter half of the twentieth century. GDP growth rates between 8.1 percent to 9.5 percent during 1992-97 were led by industry and services, though the...

The privatization process in the transition economies may appear to be the most serious economic event in the last 10-12 years. All transition countries experimented with different privatization models. Although the privatization processes have not ended yet, the development of a methodology for...

In advanced market economies, the use of trade credits is an important way of short-term financing and generally considered as being part of normal business practice. Some transition economies, however, have experienced a rapid accumulation of trade credits which have led to interlocking webs of...