I analyze three scenarios including no Eastward enlargement of the EU and the accession of Central European countries including and excluding Slovakia. The formulation of these scenarios is derived from the evidence on former relations between EU and EFTA as estimated by gravity models for total...

The implications of integration with the European Union on the labour markets of Central and East European transition economies have been neglected in the literature. We build an Applied General Equilibrium Model for Hungary and the Slovak Republic and simulate the integration process with...

In 1993, Czechoslovakia experienced a two-fold break-up: On January 1, the country disintegrated as a political union, while preserving an economic and monetary union. Then, the Czech-Slovak monetary union collapsed on February 8. We analyze the economic background of the two break-ups, and...

Group lending has proved to be a successful form of lending in credit markets for poor people. In this paper, the policy of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is modeled. It is shown that under certain conditions making borrowers jointly liable for their loans can induce repayment even in the...

In this paper we estimate income elasticities and own- and cross-price elasticities for a number of categories of goods. The methodology used was proposed by Deaton (1987). Expenditure and quantity data from Household Budget Surveys for Bulgaria are used. The households are geographically...

The empirical evidence suggests that there is a significant, negative relationship between inflation and economic growth. Conventional monetary growth models, however, predict a significantly smaller growth effect. This paper proposes a monetary growth model with an explicit credit service...

In this paper, we compare the results obtained by using double logarithmic demand functions with the one obtained by using functions that relate budget shares to the logarithms of prices and incomes in order to estimate income elasticities and own- and cross-price elasticities for a number of...

Early in the 1990s, the introduction of economic reforms in Russia created expectations of a substantial reallocation of labour; "old" jobs in the state and former-state sector were to be shed and "new" jobs created in new private firms. Although the labour market experienced relatively heavy...

The Central and Eastern European countries' prospects of becoming EU members depend heavily on, among other things, their per capita GDP levels. The growth prospects of these economies cannot be directly assessed, as the economic growth process in the transition countries is shown to not yet be...

We address the question of exchange rate regime for the Czech Republic before it enters the EU and the EMU. We classify macroeconomic impacts of a single currency regime according to the traditional OCA theory. Using quantitative measures, we find the degree of macroeconomic convergence between...