We investigate whether competitive forces and privatization have yet begun to play an efficiency-enhancing role in Russia. We also explore the economic effects of harder bidget constraints on enterprise behaviour. The empirical work is based on a large enterprise panel of Russian firms...

It has been argued that employee owned firms are not a viable organizational form; either they will fail as commercial undertaking or degenerate into capitalist firms as the proportion of hired workers increases. In this paper, we assemble 'stylized facts' on, and investigate empirically diverse...

This paper reports the main findings from a survey of some 200 Polish firms carried out at the end of 1993. The central focus is on the relationship between different emerging forms of ownership and the extent and nature of enterprise level adjustments taking place. Four broad categories of...

In this paper we use a large panel data set to test competing hypotheses about investment in employee owned firms (EOFs), especially the view that EOFs will invest less. Most of the variables stressed by labour-management theorists as inhibiting investment are found not to play any role in...

Banking reform is one of the crucial components of a successful programme of transition to the market. In Hungary, the banking system was highly centralised and based on supporting the central planning system from about 1950, though some decentralisation was undertaken well before other...

The paper analyses the difference between the behaviour of private firms and producer cooperatives in a matched sample of the two organisational types from Northern Italy, the region with the largest concentration of cooperatives in the world. It therefore offers for the first time reliable and...

We use evidence from a survey of approximately 200 Polish state-owned, privatized, and de novo private manufacturing firms to investigate the nature and scope of enterprises-level provision of social benefits, and in particular how enterprise-level social provision is changing with transition,...

Following the unification of the two Germanies in October 1990, the former German Democratic Republic was subject to a series of economic shocks, resulting in large declines in output and employment. This paper investigates the behaviour of the East German labour market during the initial stages...

The recent experience of Eastern European economies- Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia - is analysed in terms of two simple models, the first model characterises the planned economy and derives an expression for the monetary overhang. The second model analyses the dynamics of transition in...