Institutional development in new and potential member countries determines the success of both the catching-up of developing European countries and the deepening of the European integration process. This paper argues that the timing of future enlargement should depend on institutional...

This paper uses a simple VAR analysis to examine 5 CEE countries (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia) in order to understand whether their business cycles are synchronized with each other and/or with the major economies that they are supposed to be linked with, namely the...

In this paper we document and analyse gross job flows in five transition countries, Poland, Estonia, Slovenia, Bulgaria and Romania. Using comparable firm level data over the years 1993- 1997, we find that in early transition job destruction dominates job creation, while the latter is picking up...

The transition process in Central and Eastern Europe was associated with growing environmental awareness. This paper analyses the determinants of Pollution Abatement and Control Expenditure (PACE) at plant level in the case of Romania using survey data and a Multilevel Regression Model (MRM)....

We evaluate the presence of effects from joining one of four active labour market programs in Romania in the late 1990s compared to the no-program state. Using rich survey data and propensity score matching, we find that three programs (training and retraining, small business assistance, and...

Recent empirical evidence has found that employment services and small-business assistance programmes are often successful at getting the unemployed back to work. One important concern of policy makers is to decide which of these two programmes is more effective and for whom. Using unusually...

Recent empirical research on efficiency gains for Russia from WTO membership concludes that service trade liberalization especially through allowing foreign suppliers to invest in Russian service industries promises the largest gains. This points to sizable efficiency deficits in the Russian...

Human trafficking is a humanitarian problem of global scale, but quantitative research on the issue barely exists. This paper is a first attempt to explore the economic drivers of human trafficking and migrant exploitation using micro data. We argue that migration pressure combined with informal...

The Covid-19 pandemic severely affected some categories of non-standard workers, and particularly the self-employed. The emergency measures cushioned the potentially disastrous effect on their social circumstances, but undeniably highlighted even more the gaps in their access and entitlement to...