The authors explain why in the Former Soviet Union (FSU) - especially Russia - unemployment has remained low and employment in state and privatized firms has remained high, while at the same time the informal or unofficial economy has grown swiftly. They trace this development to a combination...

The past 15 months have seen the beginning of structural change in Russia but a failure of the economy to stabilize. The balance sheet, conclude the authors suggests that a return to centralized control remain almost impossible, but the dencentralization that has occurred contain many...

The authors analyze changes in the Russian labor market in 1992. They focus on the path of wages and employment in a context of partial price liberalization and considerable ambiguity about government and central bank policy. Under the former Soviet economy, the firm was the bedrock of the...

This paper takes stock of labor market developments in Bosnia and Herzegovina over the period 2001-2004, using the panel Living Standards Measurement Study/Living in Bosnia and Herzegovina survey. The analysis estimates a multinomial logit model of labor market transitions by state of origin...

The paper provides an up-to date and selective review of the literature on how social safety nets contribute to growth. The evidence is carefully chosen to show how safety nets have the potential to overcome constraints on growth linked to market failures, and is organized into 4 distinct...

The authors describe the main changes in the Hungarian labor market since 1989. They focus especially on changes in behavior in state and privatized firms, since the shedding and restructuring of labor are at the heart of the transition. They describe five types of firms: 1) state firms (often...

Russian firms commonly provide many nonmonetary benefits to workers, including such benefits as housing and some aspects of education and health care. Nonmonetary benefits may amount to 35 percent of labor costs, which is high compared with OECD countries. In a market economy, most of these...

The authors address the issue of how wages are determined in socialist economies. They distinguish between different types of economic regimes, in terms of how much decentralization is permitted and how extensive are market-based features orrules. Wages are commonly assumed to be exogenously...

The authors try to distinguish between general and national features in explaining the impulse, transmission channels, and path of output decline in Hungary and Poland. It is clear that output losses are massively concentrated in the socialized industrial sectors, but they identify significant...

This report focuses on the implications for wage bargaining and policy of inherited ownership arrangements and rules about wage setting during the transition of socialist economies. The authors discuss the strong tendency toward overemployment and wage drift in socialist systems. They focuses on...