Economic restructuring in the transition from plan to market concerns the way enterprises try to achieve competitive advantage. Therefore, enterprises have to decide where to compete, that is to say with which product they should enter which markets, and how to compete, that is by which strategy...

This paper presents error correction estimates of a simple interdependent model of the labour market using monthly data over 1990-1994 for the industrial sector in Poland and Hungary. The aim is to investigate three issues in the performance of labour markets during transition. First, is there a...

In a transforming economy there is a common legacy of most companies: their low competitiveness as the result of an obsolete capital stock and overmanning, insufficient product quality that does not satisfy demand, distorted specialization patterns, high and partly ill-designed integration,...

Economic re-integration after a long period of separation among countries with different levels of development is expected to start in border regions. Enterprises along the borderline can gain a rent due to low transport and transaction costs. They benefit from the fortunate opportunity of...

In the five years after unification, efforts to bring up the eastern part of Germany to the level of the western one have made considerable progress. Eastern Germany's growth is moving towards the double digits, just like growth in the Pacific Rim region. But not all things have developed as...

The dynamics of privatization in the Eastern Germany can be better understood in terms of the 'economic polities' applied to the 'political markets'. The Treuhandanstalt played a key role in transforming the entire economy of the former GDR into the market economy in the wake of unification of...

Seven years after the transition from plan to market, it is hard to summon up much enthusiasm for the results of active restructuring of the eastern German economy. Although companies have made considerable efforts to reach the efficiency level of their western German counterparts, the gap is...

This study investigates the role of government activity in economic growth, arguing that economic systems are important and that, therefore, one size of government does not fit all countries. Taking a panel of 111 countries over the years from 1971 to 2010, we consider clusters of economic...

We argue that the literature on government size suffers from neglecting the role of governance both as a driving and a limiting factor for government spending. Cross-country evidence for a sample of 126 developed and developing countries averaging data for the period 2003-07 reveals that better...

This paper deals with fluctuations over time in the extent of the state-owned firm sector? nationalization-privatization cycles (NPCs). Anecdotal observations of NPCs are supported threefold by systematic empirical evidence: first, for different regions and economic systems, second, for...