Widely ignoring recommendations from mainstream economics, the some Central Asian countries have achieved remarkable economic growth rates since their transformational recession in the 1990s. While Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan have greatly benefitted from increasing world market...

Rapid urbanization is an important characteristic of African development and yet the structural transformation debate focuses on agriculture's relative merits without also considering the benefits from urban agglomeration. As a result, African governments are often provided conflicting...

Early states like China, India, Italy and Greece have been experiencing more rapid economic growth in recent decades than have later-comers to agriculture and statehood like New Guinea, the Congo, and Uruguay. We show that more rapid growth by early starters has been the norm in economic...

The quality of institutions is considerable worse in Central Asia than in other transition countries. Based on a panel of 25 transition countries for the period from 1996 to 2005, this paper shows that oil and aid exert a negative influence on institutional development. At the same time,...

While the regional economic integration encompassing the former Soviet Union (FSU) transpires to be inefficient, there appears to be a stronger interest in regionalism in smaller groups of more homogenous and geographically connected countries of the region, specifically, Central Asia. Using a...

Using 2005 firm level data for 26 ECA countries, this paper estimates performance gaps between male- and female-owned businesses, while controlling for their location by industry and country. We find that female entrepreneurs have significantly smaller scale of operations (as measured by sales...

After more than two decades of agrarian change in Tajikistan, farming structures seem to crystallise. The first signs towards farm individualisation were observed only around 2000, which were the result of significant pressure from outside, when the post-conflict state was highly susceptible to...