Inefficiently organized, factory-dominated cityscapes have been one of the more enduring legacies of the twentieth century experiment with socialist central planning in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Drawing on a unique survey of large, formerly state-owned urban industrial firms in...

We study the effects of homeownership on labor force participation and unemployment. We exploit housing privatization and restitution after the fall of communism as a source exogenous assignment of homeowner/renter status, using a unique dataset from the city of Brno, Czech Republic. We do not...

We trace the rise of the so called oligarchs in post-Soviet Russia and examine their relationship to income distribution in Russia. When Russia moved to a market economy in the 1990s a new business elite evolved. Russia's distinctive path towards market economy, among other factors, gave rise to...

Like other countries with vertically integrated, state-owned railroads, the Russian Federation has begun a process of corporate restructuring designed to lead to full vertical separation of train ownership from track operation. This model is popular with economists and reformers around the...

The railways of Russia and the CEE countries - generally much more freight oriented, and much more important to their countries' economies, than those of Western Europe - are in the process of restructuring. In most cases the "vertical separation" reform model is being pursued, and reformers are...

The liberalization of the land use market has become the most pressing economic issue for the Chinese Government in recent years. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of land market operations in China with an update of its land policies. It will first present some background...

Indigenous governments in Canada are increasingly authorized to adopt laws that convert communally held lands to individual fee simple. They will convert title to fee simple in order to obtain the economic benefits commonly associated with private ownership and its securitization. However,...

India has used export processing zones as a development strategy since the mid 1960s. The performance of these zones did not meet expectations and, in 2001, the government changed the rules and the name, and recast them as special economic zones. Indian special economic zone policy was...

An American attorney directing a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) program supporting privatization of urban and industrial land in Georgia since autumn 1997 describes the procedure whereby previously privatized enterprises can acquire the land beneath and surrounding those...