This paper reviews the experience of the five Central Asian countries in the two decades since independence. In the 1990s the five countries looked like a natural experiment. They had similar initial conditions, but different transition strategies. Today that does not appear to have been a...

Household survey data from the Kyrgyz Republic are used to analyse changes in the determinants of household expenditure during the transition from central planning. Quantile regression is applied to a human capital model with consumption related to the household head's education and controlled...

Gender changes in the workplace during the transition from central planning are analyzed using household survey data from the Kyrgyz Republic. As the labor market became more market-driven between 1993 and 1997, mean differences by gender in labor force participation (LFP), monthly compensation...

This paper provides an assessment of employment and working conditions in Latvia before and immediately after the EU accession. The issues addressed include self-employment, multiple jobs, fixed-term contracts, unreported wages, overtime, unsocial working hours, health and safety at work, social...

The note documents and discusses the modalities and consequences of the phenomenon of siphoning profits of state enterprises for private uses by state enteprise managers and insiders in Bulgaria during the period of early transition.

This paper examines whether terms of trade shocks have an asymmetric effect on private savings in transition economies. A simple three-period framework is developed to show that, in the presence of binding credit constraints in bad states of nature, savings rates can be sensitive to favorable...

Meeting government revenue needs without inhibiting private sector development is a key challenge of tax policy during the transition from the socialist system. The paper explores issues in the design of tax bases and tax structures in the transition and argues that transition economies would...

This paper analyses the dynamics of wage and income inequality in Slovenia from 1993 to 2002, using two different data sources. The first is obtained by extracting relevant information on wage earners from the personal income tax (PIT) database and the second is obtained using published data on...

In December 1997, the Czech Republic became the first transitional economy to adopt an inflation-targeting (IT) framework. This paper addresses two important topics: optimal inflation-targeting horizon and optimal speed of disinflation. A small, aggregate, forward-looking model of the Czech...

One important determinant of the speed and success of transition will be the efficiency of transformation and development of the infrastructure sectors. A great deal of attention has been paid to issues such as privatisation, restructuring, user prices, and terms of access in these sectors,...