"Major changes have occurred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment, and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services...

"Loayza and Soto present policy and outcome-based ways of measuring the progress of market-oriented reforms in both traditional areas of first-generation reform and the areas of institutional reform that have been emphasized lately. These policy areas are the domestic financial system,...

In January 1999, Poland launched a new pension system that was the result of 5-6 years of broad outreach campaigns and complex negotiations within the government and between the government and key stakeholder groups. A number of compromises were made to broaden support for the reform; these...

Serbia needs to transition to a greener growth model for internal and external reasons. Internally, Serbia's economy is still characterized by low energy and resource productivity, with significant impacts on health and the environment. As a candidate country for EU membership, Serbia also needs...

This Report discusses the challenge of budget financing of core structural reforms, within a broader framework of fiscal management reforms in Russia. It argues that explicit financing of structural reforms is fully justifiable because these are the investments in the institutional...

As Russia continues to make rapid general progress in building modem market institutions, the complex spatial dimension of transformation in the country will continue to present strong policy challenges for many years to come. In fact, these challenges are arguably becoming progressively...

The purpose of this Country Economic Memorandum (CEM) is to assess the extent of structural change in the Russian Federation, and its contribution to long-term growth - a prerequisite for meeting the government's ambitious economic objectives. The report starts with the hypothesis that Russia's...

Russia is reforming its education system to meet the needs of the country's evolving economic structure with its changing focus on information and services. This is known as the information - or knowledge - economy. The reform effort is now being expanded to incorporate the support that...