It has recently become customary to argue that Russian economic transformation since 1991 has failed because of bad policy advice and mistaken policy choices. Though Russia's performance leaves much to be desired, such criticisms are based on a failure to analyse the real choices available to...

We analyse how the choice of reform speed and economic growth affect one another. We estimate a system of three equations where economic growth, economic reform and FDI are jointly determined. New reforms affect economic growth negatively, whereas the level of past reform leads to higher growth...

GDP per capita growth rates in Russia have been among the highest in the world since the mid-1990s. Previous growth accounting research suggests that this was mainly driven by multi-factor productivity (MFP) growth. In this paper we analyse for the first time the drivers of Russian growth for...

In this paper, we assess whether recent economic developments in Russia are symptomatic of Dutch Disease. We first provide a brief review of the literature on Dutch Disease and the natural resource curse. We then discuss the symptoms of Dutch Disease, which include (1) real exchange rate...

This study examines the forecasting power of confidence indicators for the Russian economy. ARX models are fitted to the six confidence or composite indicators, which were then compared to a simple benchmark AR-model. The study used the output of the five main branches as the reference series....

Barro and Sala-I-Martin empirical framework of neoclassical Solow-Swan model is specified to determine the FDI impact on per capita growth in 74 Russian regions during period of 1996-2003. The Arellano-Bond GMM-DIFF methodology, developed for dynamic panel data models, is used in estimations....

Modern banking institutions were virtually non-existent in the planned economies of central Europe and the former Soviet Union. In the early transition period, banking sectors began to develop during several years of macroeconomic decline and turbulence accompanied by repeated bank crises....

We use a dynamic heterogeneous panel model to estimate real equilibrium exchange rates for advanced transition countries. Our method is based on out-of-sample estimations from middle-income and high-income countries, and we use a pooled mean group estimator. We find that exchange rates have...

This paper investigates the importance of factor endowment vis-à-vis institutions in explaining the locational choice of foreign investors during the 1990s. Using dynamic panel estimation on data for transition economies, we find that low labour costs, bureaucratic efficiency ("institutions"),...

This paper evaluates the usefulness of business sentiment indicators for forecasting developments in the Chinese real economy. We use data on diffusion indices collected by the People's Bank of China for forecasting industrial production, retail sales and exports. Our bivariate vector...