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...

Foreign-dominated banking sectors, such as those prevalent in Central and Eastern Europe, are susceptible to two major sources of systemic risk: (i) linkages between local banks and (ii) linkages between a foreign mother bank and its local subsidiary. Using a nonparametric method based on...

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...

The objective of this paper is to discuss macroeconomic policies that would help African countries, especially the low income countries, reach strong, sustained and shared growth in the post-crisis world. The paper first reviews, with a special focus on LICs, macroeconomic policies in Africa...

We focus on the conflict between two central bank objectives, namely individual bank stability and systemic stability. We study the licensing policy of the Central Bank of Russia (CBR) in 1999-2002. Banks in poorly banked regions, banks that are too big to be disciplined adequately and banks...

This paper examines the moderation of inflation in three transition economies, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland at the end of the 1990s. We argue that the institutions for the conduct of monetary policy in these countries were relatively weak and that monetary policy was unsupported by...

Good monetary policy requires estimates of all of its effects: monetary policy impacts traditional economic variables such as output, unemployment rates, and inflation. But does monetary policy influence crime rates? By extending the vector autoregression literature, we derive estimates of the...

The rapid growth of barter is one of the most surprising phenomena in Russia: As a percentage of industrial sales it steadily increased from 5% in 1992 to nearly 55% in 1998. Unknown in CEEC's transition countries, barter is only one aspect of the Russian economy's demonetisation [process, along...

A general consensus in the transition economies literature links the existence of enterprise restructuring with the pace of the transition process and the potential for economic growth. The existing literature is less clear, however, about whether the lack of economic growth is caused by the...