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...

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...

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...

The paper surveys recent results of auction theory, bargaining theory and political economy in order to compare different methods of privatization. We assume that a government is not only interested in maximizing revenues from privatization, but also in achieving an efficient allocation of...

This paper trys to clarify the political economy arguments underlying the big bang and the gradualist approach to economic transition. The big bang approach emphasizes the importance of windows of opportunity when ex ante political constraints are less binding, whereas gradualist programmes are...

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...