The protection of property rights is more and more recognised as a core issue for improvement of the investment climate in Russia. In many post-privatisation Russian enterprises, shareholder rights have been severely disregarded by self-dealing transactions of the management, share dilution,...

The central European transition-accession countries experienced several periods of macroeconomic vulnerability since the end of output declines in early 1990s. Some notable periods, which resulted in a necessity to implement extensive stabilisation measures, are March 1995 in Hungary, May 1997...

The 15 newly independent states that emerged from the breakdown of the Soviet Union are now celebrating their 10th anniversary of independence. This paper looks back over the first decade and draws some lessons from the experience made to date. It focuses on the energy-rich states of the...

This paper explores how bank characteristics and the institutional environment influence the composition of banks’ loan portfolios. Using a new data set based on the recent EBRD Banking Environment and Performance Survey (BEPS), which was conducted in 2005 for 220 banks in 20 transition...

This paper looks at the relation between foreign direct investment (FDI) and gross fixed capital formation in transition countries as well as other sources of capital formation financing, namely debt financing, capital market financing and subsidies. The paper shows that capital formation is...

We study the nexus between enterprises and the state in transition countries, using new enterprise survey data. We examine the quality of governance, state intervention in enterprise decision-making, state benefits to firms and corruption payments. The quality of governance varies both across...

This paper uses data from a large survey of firms across 26 transition countries to examine the determinants of trust in the transition process. We first introduce a new measure of trust between firms: the level of prepayment demanded by suppliers from their customers in advance of delivery....

This paper reports the findings of a survey of more than 3,000 firms in 20 transition countries. It shows that barter and other non-monetary transactions (including the use of bills of exchange, debt swaps, barter chains, and the redemption of debt in goods) are an important phenomenon in Russia...

This paper examines institutional differences between the former East and West Germany and four central European transition countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and the Slovak Republic). Using enterprise survey data we show that the quality of both formal and informal institutions in...

This paper studies the effect of religious and linguistic diversity in a given locality on individual entrepreneurial behaviour, and finds that cultural diversity and entrepreneurship follow an inverted U-shaped pattern. We make three theoretical contributions. Unlike previous research, we are...