The paper synthesizes general lessons of Bulgaria's experience with public finance reforms in the early transition arising from the 14-paper volume FINANCING GOVERNMENT IN THE TRANSITION: BULGARIA, Political Economy of Tax Policies, Tax Bases, and Tax Evasion, World Bank Regional and Sectoral...

This paper provides a critical review of the literature on economic transitions in Central and Eastern Europe, highlighting their relevance to current economic and political changes in other parts of the world. It outlines the debate between the proponents of rapid and wholesale reforms – also...

This paper provides an assessment of quality of life in Italian cities using the hedonic approach. We analyze micro-level data for housing and labor markets to estimate compensating differentials for local amenities within five domains: climate, environment, services, society and economy. The...

This paper presents an experimental investigation of persuasion bias, a form of bounded rationality whereby agents communicating through a social network are unable to account for possible repetitions in the information they receive. The results indicate that network structure plays a...

In the past 20 years the average real earnings of Chinese urban male workers have increased by 350 per cent. Accompanying this unprecedented growth is a considerable increase in earnings inequality. Between 1988 and 2007 the variance of log earnings increased from 0.27 to 0.48, a 78 per cent...

The acquisitions notified by the Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) under EU merger control regime have raised a number of questions as to the suitability of the current merger control rules and standards applied by the EU Commission for the ex ante assessment of the likely impact of such...

This paper quantifies the impact of incentives related to potential membership on institutional change as measured by the World Bank Governance Indicators (WBGI). Based on a panel of 25 transition countries for the period from 1996 to 2008 we show that pre-accession incentives provided by EU and...

It is argued in literature that two schools of thoughts might have been most relevant and influential to the policy formation and implementation in transition economies, with distinguishable economic and social outcomes. While Russia and some countries in the Central and Eastern Europe have...

In this paper we use rich panel data for a representative sample of Estonian enterprises to analyse diverse issues related to the determinants of ownership structures and ownership changes after privatisation. A key focus is to determine whether ownership changes are related to economic...

The paper analyzes the decline of tax revenue/GDP ratios in transition economies of central and eastern Europe. The paper separates the effect on revenues of discretionary policy actions and finds that endogenous factors, notably the collapse of underlying profits and declining effective tax...