Throughout Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), there is a widespread failure of enterprise debtors to make scheduled payments of principal and interest to creditors, who in turn have strong incentives not to declare bankruptcy. In such circumstances, the price mechanism does not properly guide the...

The demise of the CMEA trading system in 1991 and the shift to convertible currency settlements and world market prices was expected to bring about a severe contraction of intra-group trade, coupled with large imbalances in trade between Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The observed...

East European countries have experienced sharp declines in real GDP since 1990. One of the reasons for this decline is the Soviet trade shock caused by the collapse of the CMEA and of traditional export markets in the Soviet Union. This paper is an attempt to quantify the magnitude of this...

Widespread concern has been expressed that the costs of reducing environmental pollution in Eastern Europe will divert resources that would otherwise be available for industrial modernization. In fact, apart from a number of severely damaged areas, the general level of exposure to major...

This paper applies the methodology and the empirical results derived from the `endogenous growth literature' to the East European countries. From that baseline, we analyse the solvency of Eastern Europe by calculating a `growth-adjusted-debt-per-effective-capita' measure of the burden of debt in...