The main focus of this paper is on the process and progress of economic reform in Russia. But I start with four historical questions that bear on the current situation. How advanced was Russia in 1913? What relevance, if any, does the New Economic Policy of the 19205, or NEP, have for the...

This paper reviews recent literature on China's macroeconomic development, emphasizing the critical role of the gradualist approach over the past four decades. Beyond China's structural transformation, we explore various aspects such as high saving rates, the housing boom, an expanding current...

This paper considers the effect of the First World War on large-scale businesses in Second-Industrial-Revolution industries like steel, electricity, and chemicals. For firms in the nations of the Entente, we argue, the war mainly interrupted long-term trends that resumed in the aftermath of the...

We measure the impact of a drastic new technology for producing steel - the minimill - on the aggregate productivity of U.S. steel producers, using unique plant-level data between 1963 and 2002. We find that the sharp increase in the industry's productivity is linked to this new technology, and...

During the past five years, there has been an important debate over the differing styles of market reforms in the formerly planned economies in East Asia versus Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union (EEFSU). This paper puts forward three related propositions. First, the rapid growth of East...

While output declined in virtually all transition economies in the initial years, the speed and extent of the recovery that followed has varied widely across these countries. The contrast between the more and less successful transitions, the latter largely in the former Soviet Union, raises many...

This paper applies a logistic smooth transition regression approach to the estimation of a homogenous aggregate value added production function of the State Owned (SOE) and Foreign-Funded Enterprises (FFE) in China, 1980s-2007. The transition associated with the economic reforms in China is...