The highest rates of growth of labor productivity in the Soviet Union were observed not in the 1930s (3% annually), but in the 1950s (6%). The TFP growth rates by decades increased from 0.6% annually in the 1930s to 2.8% in the 1950s and then fell monotonously becoming negative in the 1980s. The...

This paper starts by separating the transformational recession (reduction of output in most transition economies in the first half of the 1990s) from the process of economic growth (recovery from the transformational recession) in 28 transition economies (including China, Vietnam and Mongolia)....