After the communist regimes collapsed throughout Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, they were replaced (at least initially) by relatively wide-ranging democracy. Measured by the indices of political freedom and civil liberties published by the Freedom House (see the Technical Annex for...

The gravity model of trade is used to assess the economic consequences of new borders, which arose in the wake of break-ups of multinational federations in Eastern Europe. The intensity of trade relations among the constituent parts of Czechoslovakia, Soviet Union and the Baltics was very high...