The recent financial crisis was caused by a combination of asset price bubbles, mainly in the real estate sector, and a credit bubble that led to excessive leverage. A recurrent theme of this paper is that an appropriate assessment of the crisis should be made in light of the bubble that...

The study discusses the relationship between accountability and transparency in central banking and the role and scope of parliamentary scrutiny. Special attention is given to the consequences of the current crisis for this area. For the authors, the current crisis shows that price stability...

"The paper evaluates the effects of privatization in the post-communist economies and China. In post-communist economies privatization to foreign owners results in a rapid improvement in performance of firms, while performance effects of privatization to domestic owners are less impressive and...