Russia and China are assumed to challenge democratization and to promote autocracy. In a first step, we analyze Central Asia as the most-likely case, considering both Russia and China as relevant external actors. We develop a concept for our analysis based on the different strategies of Russia...

This article reviews the literature on the linkages between political tensions, economic diplomacy and international trade in the light of China’s rise in the global economy. The existing scholarly work suggests that economic diplomacy should be more pivotal in economic exchange with China...

Based on two detailed Balassa-Samuelson (BS) studies, Wagner and Hlouskova (2004) for eight Central Eastern European countries (CEECs) and Wagner and Doytchinov (2004) for ten Western European countries (WECs), this study assesses the differences and similarities of the BS effect between these...

Modernity is usually thought as a complex society with clearly differentiated spheres of everyday life. It means, in particular, that economic rules do not interfere with the norms structuring political, social, scientific and other interactions. The complex, differentiated society sharply...

We take up the widely held view that the observed discrepancy between law on the books and law in action has prevented economic transition and investigate its role for the failure of the Bulgarian credit market. In doing so, we focus on the role of injunctive informal institutions which have...

Der Transformationsprozess Russlands von einer zentralstaatlich geplanten Volkswirtschaft hin zu einer Marktwirtschaft nach westlichem Vorbild liefert eine aufschlussreiche Fallstudie über die von William Baumol (1990) vertretene These der institutionellen Steuerbarkeit von produktivem...

With the collapse of the socialist regime in East Germany in late 1989 and the rising political call for unification in early 1990, a radical and abrupt change of the institutional structure became necessary. Among others, the (agricultural) administration had to be totally restructured. This...

Private and collective enterprises are expected to increase overall efficiency in transitional China, partly because they are more efficient than state owned enterprises. More importantly, this paper argues, they induce efficiency gains in state owned enterprises and the economy as a whole....

This paper studies whether the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy offers fundamentally new perspectives for those who, in economic terms, were relatively deprived under the old regime. Previous empirical research on this question has been limited by the availability of...

This paper argues that there is a complex socio-economic, spatial and political trend towards increasing unevenness among Russian cities against the shortage of researches about Russian urbanized space. In addition to this Russia experiences a lack of studies taking into account that, in modern...