This paper discusses alternative approaches to the measurement of the informal economy in Romania. The author proposes two essential criteria regarding the economic classification, namely whether the respective activities are or are not reported through an official established document and...

We have conducted the first survey on management practices in transition countries. We found that Central Asian transition countries, such as Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, have on average very poor management practices. Their average scores are below emerging countries such as Brazil, China and...

I use the Markov Switching AR approach to model the business cycles in Romanian economy for the 1991-2008 period using monthly data on industrial production. The time series used allows for a comparison with previous dating of Romanian business cycles. Generally, the MS-AR performs well,...

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...

In this Paper we present an overview of a number of issues relating to the equilibrium exchange rates of the new EU member states from Central and Eastern Europe. In particular, we present a critical overview of the various methods available for calculating equilibrium exchange rates and discuss...

This Paper examines the consequences of interactions between the bank lending channel and the traditional interest rate and exchange rate channels on the effectiveness of the monetary policy transmission in Poland since 1994. First, we develop a small open-economy credit-augmented model. Under...

In their privatization programs, transition governments have frequently given away shares (so-called `mass privatization'), while maintaining significant minority ownership. We explain the rationality of these policies for an expected net-revenue maximizing government. Our argument rests on a...

This paper investigates the role of structural reforms –privatization, financial reform and trade liberalization– as determinants of FDI inflows based on newly constructed dataset on structural reforms for 19 Latin American and 25 Eastern European countries between 1989 and 2004. Our main...

Conventional wisdom suggests that the stocks of human capital were one of the few positive legacies from communism. However, if factories under communism were so inefficient, why would the education system not have been? Using the education production function approach and new data on...