Innovation plays a crucial role in determining today’s economic growth patterns. But what enables some countries to innovate more than others? This paper employs in premiere a panel of sixteen Eastern European countries throughout their transition period exploring empirically the drivers of...

In Bulgaria, during the transition to market-oriented economy, many analyzes are based on the widely held view that one of the positive legacies of the economies in transition (particularly that of Bulgaria) is the high level of human capital. The high degree of development of education and...

In this paper we introduce additional parameters of the economic environment related to some notion of “distance” to institutions in a simple formal model. This distance could be viewed as an uneven spatial distribution (or coverage) of institutions with respect to population distribution....

In general, most countries of the former Eastern bloc have experienced poor growth performance and large increases in income inequality during the transition process. The most obvious success story in the process of transition to date has been Poland, which has outstripped other transition...

Although economic growth is considered one of topics the most discussed and studied by economists, some questions are hitherto unexplored. In this article we will try to address one of these issues by studying the effect of growth shocks of hegemonic countries on the growth of peripheral...

This article was published in the Czech Journal “Plánované hospodářství” in 1967. This was the time of rapid changes both in the Czechoslovak economic and political theory as well as in actual economic and political systems that culminated in the “Prague Spring” of 1968. These...

What are the economic mechanisms that account for sudden growth spurts? Are these mechanisms similar across episodes? Focusing on the economic resurgence of the BRICs over the last decade, we employ the Business Cycle Ac- counting methodology developed by Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2007) to...

This research advances the hypothesis that natural land productivity in the past, and its effect on the desirable level of cooperation in the agricultural sector, had a persistent effect on the evolution of social capital, the process of industrialization and comparative economic development...

Both long economic stagnation in Latin America and sustained growth and in East Asia imply a rapidly raising development gap between the two regions. Using a series of numerical decompositions, this article documents three facts about this gap. First, differences in welfare-adjusted development...

Do adjustment policies assist or retard growth? This paper presents data on economic performance (aggregate and sectoral growth, inflation, investment and external account) for 20 countries. The data are classified on an annual basis according to the country’s policy stance in that year:...