Stateness is the capacity of the state to exercise its fundamental functions. The collapse of the socialist system prompted the former USSR countries to ‘re-invent' their stateness. The paper focuses on factors that impede or smooth stateness transformations in post-socialist countries. First,...

It is commonplace that a sovereign state is a prerequisite to democracy. But not all states are alike, each having different resources, capacities, priorities, properties, and so forth. What kinds of states and what particular features are conducive to democracy or autocracy? How do different...

This paper presents an analysis of the welfare convergence among 27 transition economies based on the evaluation of a micro-based summary statistic combining income, consumption, leisure, life expectancy, and inequality (Jones & Klenow, 2016). The results show that the countries of the former...