"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...

"The paper evaluates the effects of privatization in the post-communist economies and China. In post-communist economies privatization to foreign owners results in a rapid improvement in performance of firms, while performance effects of privatization to domestic owners are less impressive and...

"The authors analyze the extent to which the EU-15 and 16 transition economies used the WTO General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) to commit to service sector policy reforms. They compare GATS commitments with the evolution of actual policy stances over time. While there is substantial...

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...

The overall context for the study is partly provided by the three pillars of the World Bank's new forest strategy (Sustaining Forests: A Development Strategy, 2002), which focuses on how the Bank can most effectively contribute to harnessing the potential of forests to reduce poverty, to...

The Mongolian cashmere industry has experienced a series of booms and busts over the last decade. Unsatisfactory public sector policies contributed to this result. External factors such as the unfavorable economic environment of the early 1990s, the East Asia crisis, and weather conditions have...

"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...

"This paper uses firm-level data from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Surveys to study the process of convergence of transition countries with developed market economies. The study focuses on competition and market structure, finance and the structure of lending to firms, and...

"The paper reviews labor market developments in the transition economies of Europe and Central Asia. It argues that the scarcity of productive job opportunities and the growing labor market segmentation are the two main labor market problems facing the transition economies. In the European...