We explain economic growth by both politics, i.e. government activity including spending as well as regulation, and institutional quality and its interaction with politics. This extends previous work on institution building in transition by looking at its impact and, at the same time,...

Long-term beneficial welfare state reforms not only face opposition from powerful insiders and beneficiaries of the system in place. While potential losers from a policy change are often relatively easy to spot, ewll-designed reforms generate mostly diffuse gains, and the potential winners are...

Kiev is not so far away from Brussels as one might expect. Ukraine already performs quite well when compared to the other countries in the queue for entry into the EU. Especially the fiscal and external debt figures are better than in other countries. On the negative side, there is a...