The most dramatic recent immigration in Europe is the influx of more than 700,000 Albanians, about a quarter of the total Albanian workforce, in the 1990s. The vast majority migrated illegally. This paper analyses the determinants of Albanian migration based on a unique representative survey of...

This paper uses new poverty data based on household level surveys to analyze changes in rural poverty and rural-urban poverty differences in 23 transition countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union. The paper presents a series of hypotheses to explain differences across...

This paper assesses econometrically the contribution of aid to output growth in a panel of twenty transition countries over nine years (1989-1997). The study finds a positive and statistically significant relationship between foreign aid and growth. A second result is that the positive effect of...

This paper analyses the determinants of household farms?participation in land rental markets in transition countries and what affects their access to land through rental markets. We derive several theoretical hypotheses on the impact of households?management ability, land endowment, land quality...

This paper provides a set of hypotheses to explain differences in the procedures and progress of land reforms among FSU countries. The first factor is the historical legacy of the countries and their institutions. Demand for land privatization was weak except in countries and regions where...

This paper analyzes how imperfections of property rights affect allocation of assets and welfare, using micro-survey data from Bulgaria. Co-ownership of assets is widespread in many countries due to inheritance. Central and Eastern Europe offers an interesting natural experiment to assess the...

This paper studies the effect of political regime transitions on public policy using a dataset on global agricultural distortions over 50 years (including data from 74 developing and developed countries over the period 1955-2005). We employ both difference-in-differences regressions and...

The agricultural and food sector is an ideal case for investigating the political economy of public policies. Many of the policy developments in this sector since the 1950s have been sudden and transformational, while others have been gradual but persistent. This article reviews and synthesizes...