This paper analyzes, using country-level panel data from transition economies and Latin America, the impact of labor market institutions on informal economic activity. The measure of informal economic activity is taken from Schneider et al. (2010), the most comprehensive study to date. The data...

Since the beginning of transition in 1990 from a centrally planned to a market oriented economy, the performance of Poland’s economy has been outstanding if we take GDP growth as our measure. It is not specific reforms that can explain this performance but the radical (“big bang”) reforms...

Shrinking populations have been gaining increasing attention, especially in post-socialist East and Central European countries. While most studies focus on the population decline of capital cities and their regions, much less is known about the spatial dimension of population decline on the...

The paper analyzes the incidence, the severity and the determinants of household poverty in Ukraine during transition using two comparable surveys from 1996 and 2004. We measure poverty using income and consumption and contrast the effects of various poverty lines. Poverty in both periods...

Why is it that, as the Chinese Communist Party has loosened its grip, abandoned its core beliefs, and marketized the economy, its membership has risen markedly along with the economic benefits of joining? We use three national household surveys, spanning eleven years, to answer this question...

We document changes in the structure of earnings during the economic transition in Poland. We find that inequality in labor earnings increased substantially from 1988 to 1996. A common view is that the reallocation of workers from a public sector with a compressed wage distribution, to a private...

This paper provides an illustration of the changing tolerance for inequality in a context of radical political and economic transformation and rapid economic growth. We focus on the Polish transition experience, and explore individuals' self-reported attitudes. Using unusually long and frequent...

We explore the relationship between the level of village inequality in 1986, and the subsequent growth of household incomes from 1986 to 1999. Using a detailed householdlevel data set from rural China, we find robust evidence that initial inequality is negatively related to subsequent household...