The paper analyzes the increase in transition countries’ exports to their non-traditional trade partners. It uses four different measures of product differentiation to find out the extent that the increase in product variety explains this phenomenon. It is found that opening up to new trade...

This paper uses firm level panel data to investigate empirically the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the productivity performance of domestic firms in three emerging economies of Central and Eastern Europe-Bulgaria, Romania and Poland. To this end, a unique firm level panel data...

The paper exploits a large set of more than 8,000 firms for ten advanced transition countries in order to uncover the importance of different channels of technology transfer through FDI and its impact on productivity growth of local firms. In addition to direct effects, we also distinguish...

Since McCallum’s (1995) finding of surprisingly high border effect on trade between US and Canada, there have been a number of studies on other parts of the world, and improvements made to the gravity model to accurately measure this effect. This paper suggests some other modifications to the...

The paper analyzes the factors behind the reorientation of transition countries’ exports to their non-traditional partners outside their former block. First, the amount of reorientation is calculated using a gravity model. Then, reasons for the cross-country differences in the rate of closing...

The increase in exports to market economies is a good sign, but it is not conclusive about the extent of restructuring of production technologies experienced in transition countries. This paper explores the source of the increase with an analysis of their exports’ quality, interprets the...

Trade liberalization increases competitive pressures on domestic firms, and thus creates incentives for reducing costs of production through technological progress. Through this channel, backward countries get a chance to narrow their technological gap with more advanced countries. In this...

How can we account for Indonesia’s astonishing development performance between 1965 and 1997—rapid growth, massive reduction in the incidence of poverty, low income-inequality and substantial diversification of the economy—in the face of extremely dirigiste microeconomic policies, even by...

This paper analyzes trends in different components of trade of transition countries. To explain the cross-country differences, the paper points out the important distinction between the determinants of inter-industry trade and intra-industry trade (IIT), and horizontal and vertical IIT. Using...