Recent research convincingly shows that crises beget reform. Although the consensus is that economic crises foster macroeconomic stabilization, it is silent on which types of crises cause which types of reform. Is it economic or political crises that are the most important drivers of structural...

The 'Washington consensus' and 'shock therapy' approach to transition economies ignored the Keynesian lessons from the Great Depression: that market instability is a possibility and there may be an active role of government in managing stability and growth. The severe output decline in East...

Emerging countries in many cases are more crisis-prone than highly developed industrialized countries. This is in many cases due to a weak or volatile financial sector. The best policy to strengthen crisis resistance is the building up of a sound financial position. A sound financial position of...

Auf dem EU-Gipfel von Kopenhagen im Dezember 2002 wird aller Voraussicht nach über den Beitritt der mittel- und osteuropäischen Länder zur Europäischen Union entschieden. Trotz der fortschreitenden politischen und wirtschaftlichen Integration klafft bei der Infrastrukturausstattung noch eine...

Among the stylised facts of economic transformation in East Central Europe are the following unpleasant developments-: the reemergence of fiscal deficits, the resilliance of medium inflation, and sluggish output recovery. This paper reviews the major interpretations found in the literature,...

The abandonment of central planning led to considerable output declines in countries in the firmer soviet-bloc. The magnitude and length of the output declines, as well as recovery experiences have been very diverse. Various detfirminants of outpt growth have been identified in the literature....

Transition countries provide a natural experiment to study the development of land markets. This paper provides survey-evidence of the variation in the development of land markets, identifies a series of patterns, and provides a set of hypotheses to explain these variations in land market...