How many years will the average transition economy need to reach the income level of the average OECD country? The favored methodology in use to answer such questions is referred to as the BLR approach, because it uses specifications from Barro, and Levine and Renelt. The literature has so far...

This paper investigates the role of structural reforms - privatization, financial reform and trade liberalization as determinants of FDI inflows based on newly constructed dataset on structural reforms for 19 Latin American and 25 Eastern European countries between 1989 and 2004. Our main...

Why do workers change occupations? This paper investigates occupational mobility and its determinants following a large unexpected shock (communism's collapse in 1989.) Our calculations show that from 1989 to 1995 between 35 and 50 percent of Estonian workers changed occupations (classified at...

This essay surveys macroeconomic issues that marked the transition from centrally planned to market economy in Central and Eastern European and former Soviet Union countries. We first establish a set of stylized facts of the transition so far, namely: (1) output fell, (2) capital shrank, (3)...

There are two strands in the empirical literature on economic growth in transition economies. One focuses on the impact of reforms, while the other emphasizes sustainability issues and the growth prospects these economies face. The most common strategy, in the latter, has been to use...

This paper investigates the importance of factor endowment vis-à-vis institutions in explaining the locational choice of foreign investors during the 1990s.Using dynamic panel estimation on data for transition economies, we find that low labour costs, bureaucratic efficiency ("institutions"),...

In their survey of the literature on ethnic fractionalization and economic performance, Alesina and La Ferrara (JEL 2005) identify two main directions for future research. One is to improve the measurement of diversity and the other to treat diversity as an endogenous variable. This paper tries...

The relationship between economic and political liberalization has received a great deal of attention lately, yet the possibility of a nonlinear relationship and the role of reversals remain largely neglected. Focusing on democratization and financial reform, this paper offers evidence for a...

We construct objective measures of privatization, internal and external liberalization reform efforts, across countries over time, and investigate their determinants, reversals and macroeconomic impacts. We find that GDP growth determines external liberalization and privatization, concentration...

Does fractionalization change over time? If so, are there any substantial implications for economic performance? To answer such questions, we construct a new panel data set with fractionalization measures for 26 former communist countries covering the period from 1989 to 2002. Our...