This paper challenges the conventional wisdom that income and consumption inequality in Poland increased substantially following the economic transition in 1989–90. Using microdata from the 1985–92 Household Budget Surveys, we find that overall income inequality increased in 1989 but...

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....

Conventional wisdom posits absence of systematic relationship between economic reforms and human rights. Taking the case of transition economies, Vadlamannati & Soysa (2008) shows significant positive relationship between economic reforms and various forms of human rights. This brings us to the...

This paper is analyzing a dynamic evolutionary game of firm-bank interaction to underline the importance of the interaction regime for encouraging or discouraging soft-budget phenomena and financial disorder. The poor performance of public sector's firms, which led globally to quests for the...

This paper examines the principal agricultural transformations in a selected group of former socialist countries in Asia and Eastern and Central Europe, using commonly-accepted indicators such as physical output, labor productivity, and agricultural yields, and offers some relevant...

In this paper we investigate an example of a very widely applied model for the delivery of IT services to rural and poor populations. The model is one where limited intervention to support infrastructure and coordinate resources is combined with market-based delivery of IT services to the end...

This paper examines the impact of transaction costs on economic welfare and development. We extend the static model of Romer (1994), in which transaction costs reduce welfare by the reducing the equilibrium number of intermediate goods, and estimate the welfare losses in the case of domestic...

As the legislation on foreign direct investment (FDI) in Hungary has been probably the most liberal in Central and Eastern Europe since the mid-1980s, FDI is the primary form chosen by Western firms to enter the Hungarian market. The major channels of FDI include the privatisation of former...

Abstract: Daniel Drezner’s 1999 book The Sanctions Paradox used case studies from the former Soviet Union in the 1990s to test his game-theoretic model—the Conflict Expectations Model--of sanctions behavior. The model purports to help predict whether or not a “sender” will resort to...

The question raised in the present paper is: What is the human capital during the communism and which are the key political and economic determinants of its formation during this period? Firstly, a measurement of the human capital is conducted on the basis of quantitative educational indicators....