Although an extensive amount of literature reviews emerging patterns of east-west co-operation, it is not easy to grasp the state of the art. Too many of the books, articles and papers tend to mark the trees rather than to map the forest. The paper analyses recent trends from the point of view...

Economic restructuring in the transition from plan to market concerns the way enterprises try to achieve competitive advantage. Therefore, enterprises have to decide where to compete, that is to say with which product they should enter which markets, and how to compete, that is by which strategy...

Changes in exchange rates have become a prominent issue in Germany and Japan - due to the enormous appreciation of the Deutschmark and the Yen. Conventional wisdom suggests that economic activity will be negatively affected if a currency is going through a phase of appreciation. The paper...

Our paper explores the recent trends in outward processing (OP) of German firms in former centrally planned economies (CPEs). We argue that OP is an interesting alternative to cross-border trade and equity foreign arrangements. We present the theoretical framework to understand OP as well as...

Economic theory suggests that multinationals have clear objectives when investing abroad. It lists a considerable number of factors which may influence the decision but it falls short of explaining them. The paper investigates how the most popular hypotheses presented in the literature perform...

The paper offers a vision of the future of cross-border activities between Germany and the Central and East European reform countries. It provides a comprehensive theoretical framework and it presents some stylized facts. It focuses on three prominent areas: trade in goods and services,...

In a transforming economy there is a common legacy of most companies: their low competitiveness as the result of an obsolete capital stock and overmanning, insufficient product quality that does not satisfy demand, distorted specialization patterns, high and partly ill-designed integration,...

This paper deals with the interactions between outward investments of western multinationals and export performance of their affiliates in transition countries. It argues that multinationals make an important contribution to increasing, diversifying and up-grading trade, because they are able to...