Many of the states of the former Soviet Union have experienced a dramatic collapse of output during transition, which has not yet been reversed in a sustainable way. The economics of disorganization, proposed by Blanchard (1997) and tested empirically by Blanchard and Kremer (1997), reasons that...

The output contractions during the initial transition stages in the Baltics and in Russia and the other CIS countries are examined across several dimensions, and the reliability of the available official statistics evaluated. The depth, length and breadth of the contractions are studied and set...