Despite the fact that theoretical research on opportunistic political cycles is very intuitive and well developed, empirical literature has found fairly weak evidence of opportunistic political cycles. This Paper tests the theory in a decade-old democracy – Russia. We find strong evidence of...

Fiscal reform is central to the process of transforming a Soviet-type economy to a market economy, for with the emergence of a significant private sector, the boundaries between the public and private sectors needs to be more sharply drawn. The paper draws lessons from the experience of the...

Before the transition governments had strong distributional objectives, which they pursued mainly by direct controls over state enterprise wage rates and hiring decisions, yielding a highly compressed wage distribution. During the reform they maintained similar controls over state enterprises,...

Even relatively poor people oppose high rates of redistribution because of the anticipation that they, or their children, may move up the income ladder. This ‘Prospect of Upward Mobility’ (POUM) hypothesis is commonly advanced to explain why democracies do not engage in large-scale...

Several countries have recently abolished or significantly reduced their taxes on bequests. Bequest taxes, on the other hand, were among the first to be introduced when modern systems of taxation were developed at the end of the nineteenth century. We propose an explanation for these facts which...

The measurement of trade costs and their effects on outcome is at the heart of a large quantitative literature in international economics. The majority of the recent significant contributions on the matter assumes that trade consists of a product of exporter-time-specific factors,...

Falling output and living standards have pushed countries in transition from the socialist system to re-consider how best to target public resources on those in need. The paper investigates the workings of a new social assistance benefit in Uzbekistan, the largest of the former Soviet Central...

The paper analyses the revenue-raising, distributional and incentive effects of the personal tax system in Hungary from the start of the transitional tax reforms of 1988, and develops methods for estimating marginal indirect taxes. It evaluates the distributional impact of revenue-neutral...

Our survey of private manufacturing firms finds the size of hidden "unofficial" activity to be much larger in Russia and Ukraine than in Poland, Slovakia and Romania. A comparison of cross-country averages shows that managers in Russia and Ukraine face higher effective tax rates, worse official...

The Paper is one of the first attempts to compute cyclical and structural deficits for a set of countries candidate to accession to the EU. Three main results are derived: first, the high deficits observed in candidate countries in recent years have a structural nature. Second, the fiscal stance...