The European Commission awarded a contract in November 2005 to a consortium composed of the TARKI Social Research Institute (Hungary), CASE, Center for Social and Economic Research (Poland) and CEPS to analyse the socio-economic developments and the process of structural reforms in what were...

The increasing life expectancy and the alarming growth in the incidence of chronic illness make long term care services in high demand and in dire need of change and innovation. As part of the ANCIEN initiative, which aims to comprise a database of European approaches for dealing with long term...

This paper focuses on knowledge-based entrepreneurship, or new firm creation in industries which are considered to be science-based or to use research and development intensively, in the East Central European (ECE) context. On the basis of case studies of thirteen knowledge-based firms in six...

Pension systems and pension expenditures show large variations among countries worldwide. This variation appears to reflect mainly demographic factors and differences in the level of insurance protection, the latter tending to increase with the level of development. The focus of this paper is...

The paper is an attempt at a comparative overview of banking sector systemic risk in six Central European countries as of the end of 1997 concluding with some policy recommendations. The countries covered by the paper (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) are specific...

In Romania before 1989, as elsewhere in the Soviet world, retirement support was one of the few rewards that the regime offered its citizens. Retirement provisions were based exclusively transfers, through the State, from the current working population to the pensioners. Technically, the system...

This paper attempts to consider in a systematic way the developments of the public debt in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Romania during the 1990.s. After a brief outline of the public indebtedness of the four countries before 1989, it examines the public debt dynamics after 1990 and...

The importance of new firm creation in the post-Communist economies of East Central Europe (ECE) has been subject to extensive research. This paper focuses on an area of entrepreneurship which has received relatively little attention in the transition economy context but which is of particular...