A century ago, Alfred Marshall demonstrated the inefficiency associated with farmers receiving only a portion of their marginal product. Farmers will supply less labor than under arrangements in which they receive their marginal product; output will be sub-optimal. Explanations of sharecropping...

How should the economic performance of the Central Asian countries during the 1990s be measured? The most commonly used indicator is GDP, even though GDP estimates for transition economies are known to suffer from conceptual and methodological shortcomings. This paper combines national accounts...

Kazakhstan's government has used oil revenues to promote economic diversification, including a billion dollar 2003–2005 Agriculture and Food Program to reverse the 1990s decline in agricultural output. This paper provides estimates of producer support equivalents for the main agricultural...

When the fifteen Soviet successor states joined the IMF in 1992, the most pressing monetary question was whether to retain the ruble or to issue national currencies. IMF officials have argued that the IMF's role was to present the arguments for and against alternative arrangements. This is not...

Formerly centrally planned countries may be especially vulnerable to institutional degradation and revenue volatility as sources of a resource curse. This paper examines these issues through case studies of six former Soviet republics and Mongolia, focussing on the methods of involving foreign...