The Orange Revolution in the fall of 2004 built great hopes for a better future for Ukraine. However, three years later those hopes have been replaced by disappointment, frustration and confusion. Although progress in the areas of political freedom, pluralism, civil rights and freedom in the...

The purpose of this work is to contribute to a critical analysis of what has been called 21st century socialism. Socialist regimes of the 20th century distorted the theoretical Marxian economic model partly because of the impossibility of socialist economic calculation. Allin Cottrell and Paul...

The paper examines two prevalent schools of thought explaining the deterioration of the economy and the ultimate collapse of the Soviet system. The first explanation places the blame on Gorbachev's poorly designed perestroika which destroyed the well functioning central planning system without...

Based on two detailed Balassa-Samuelson (BS) studies, Wagner and Hlouskova (2004) for eight Central Eastern European countries (CEECs) and Wagner and Doytchinov (2004) for ten Western European countries (WECs), this study assesses the differences and similarities of the BS effect between these...

In this paper we discuss the necessity for an indirect approach to assess the growth and convergence prospects of ten Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC10). The necessity for an indirect approach arises for two reasons. First, the ongoing structural changes in the transition economies...

This paper offers a detailed assessment of the Balassa-Samuelson (BS) effect in eight Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC8). Several features distinguish this study from others: First, we investigate a variety of specifications of extended models. Non-homogeneity of wages, deviations...

The transition process in which a country moves from a planned economy to a market economy offers a unique opportunity for economists and policymakers to observe and understand the effects of major institutional, legal, and political changes on economic systems. But one feature of the process...