This paper uses new poverty data based on household level surveys to analyze changes in rural poverty and rural-urban poverty differences in 23 transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. The paper presents a series of hypotheses to explain differences across...

Both the mining and the burning of coal is pollutive, so one might expect to observe taxes on coal production and consumption. Yet several countries in Western Europe subsidize coal production, and most East European countries subsidize coal consumption. The first part of this paper shows that...