Economic agents routinely face various types of economic uncertainty. Seldom have these various forms of uncertainty manifested themselves more sharply than in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe. In East Germany, the transition was especially rapid and sharp since East...

This paper puts the Reinhart-Rogoff dataset to a formal econometric testing to see whether public debt has a negative nonlinear effect on growth if public debt exceeds 90% of GDP. Using nonlinear threshold models, we show that the negative nonlinear relationship between debt and growth is very...

This paper analyses the original Reinhart-Rogoff dataset, made public by Herndon et al. (2013), on the basis of descriptive statistics and formal econometric testing. First, based on the public debt thresholds (30%, 60% and 90%) proposed by Reinhart and Rogoff (2010), descriptive statistics...

The heightened interest of African countries to access international capital markets has put public debt sustainability once again high on the continent’s policy agenda. Applying the ‘stabilizing primary balance approach’ to sustainability shows that the primary balances exceeded those...

The economic reforms in Tanzania and Vietnam represent the two typical cases of transition economies in Asia and Africa, particularrly the transformation of the two developing economies from the planned to the market mechanism. In this paper, the two authors, Brian - a British economist and Dinh...

This paper develops a model to investigate the welfare implications of barter in Russia and other transition economies during the 1990s. We argue that barter is a welfare-improving phenomenon that acts as a defense mechanism against monetary instability. When firms react to tighter credit...

Most papers on banking focus on profitability and cost efficiency as measures of performance. In doing so, these papers ignore the fact that, unlike in the manufacturing and services sector industries, the long term viability of a bank depends more on its ability to assess credit worthiness of...

The theoretical literature gives conflicting predictions on how bank competition should affect financial stability, and dozens of researchers have attempted to evaluate the relationship empirically. We collect 598 estimates of the competition-stability nexus reported in 31 studies and analyze...

The three countries took different stances in regards to economic policy; the Czech Republic pursued a shock therapy regime which aimed to stabilise the economy, Hungary’s policy was more relaxed whilst Poland had an aggressive reform programme. Regarding monetary policy the Czech Republic...

CEECs are characterised by a significant presence of foreign banks and by a marked dependence upon financing from foreign bankers. We show that this situation leaves these countries open to two types of financial risk, which have grown throughout the present decade. The first relates to the...