The formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have experienced a remarkable demographic transformation in the past twenty years. On many dimensions of fertility and family formation, much of the region now looks like Western Europe-below-replacement fertility...

We reexamine the recent controversy over the possibility that mass enterprise privatization raised mortality in post-communist countries. Our analysis demonstrates that the country-level correlation of privatization and mortality reported in previous research is not robust to recomputing the...

Two decades of transition in the five Central Asian Republics (CARs) have shown that, in the absence of a theoretical framework (roadmap) and political commitment for implementation, borrowed laws and institutions based on the international best practice are useful but not fully effective in...

This paper presents lessons from environmental management in Bulgarian agriculture for Central Asian countries. Comparative institutional analysis is employed to evaluate potential of diverse governing modes to deal with environmental problems and risks, protect absolute and contracted...

The 15 newly independent states that emerged from the breakdown of the Soviet Union are now celebrating their 10th anniversary of independence. This paper looks back over the first decade and draws some lessons from the experience made to date. It focuses on the energy-rich states of the...

After the collapse of socialism, post-Soviet republics reorganized economics curricula, published new textbooks, and trained students and academics in their home countries or in the West. How did these efforts change the quantity and quality of international publications of post-Soviet...

Growth empirics with institutional measures is performed for 25 transition countries overthe period 1990-95. Estimation results suggest that (particularly state) institutions aresignificant for growth and, especially, foreign direct investment (FDI), the latter in turnbeing important for the...

Management of capital inflows has unexpectedly become a major challenge in transition economies. These countries were expected to have an insatiable demand for foreign capital, and an excess demand for capital inflows was, therefore, predicted by most observers. Foreign investors are also known...

The Central and Eastern European countries significantly reduced their carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions between 1995 and 2003. Was this emission reduction just the fortuitous result of the major economic transformation undergone by countries in the transition? Or is it rather a result of more...