Women who want to work often face many more hurdles than men. This is true in Tajikistan where there is a large gender gap in labour force participation. We highlight the role of two factors – international migration and education – on the labour force participation decision and its gender...

The paper describes the microfinance environment in Uzbekistan, with an emphasis on two types of non-bank microfinance institutions – Credit Unions and Microcredit Organizations. The specific nature of these institutions provides new evidence of the commercially oriented microcredit model and...

We provide a theory and empirical evidence indicating that the rotation of ruling elites in conjunction with elites’ asset ownership could improve property rights protection in non-democracies. The mechanism that upholds property rights is based on elites’ concern about the security of their...

An intense discussion is taking place in International Political Economy on the influence of economic ideas on institutional change. Case studies so far have, however, mainly focused on the Western industrialised countries and research seems to be biased towards cases in which new ideas caused...

Dieser Artikel beschäftigt sich mit dem Konvergenzprozess in der Europäischen Union. Der Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf der Periode nach der Osterweiterung 2004–2007. Somit wird eine detaillierte Untersuchung vorgenommen und es werden nicht nur wirtschaftliche, sondern auch institutionelle...

We analyze the role of innovation in the technological development of four new EU members: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. For that purpose, we use a novel approach by modeling the empirical relationship between intra-industrial bilateral trade flows, which proxy the level of...

We examine the extent to which workers in transition and developed market economies are able to obtain wages that fully reflect their skills and labor force characteristics. We find that workers in two transition economies, the Czech Republic and Poland, are able to better attain the maximum...

Recent panel studies have found relatively high estimates for the elasticity of real exchange rates with respect to productivity measures in transition economies within Balassa-Samuelson frameworks. This contrasts with other findings reporting cross-section price-income elasticity estimates to...

Recent empirical studies have been searching for evidence on and driving forces for offshoring. Typically, this search has been conducted by analysing gross trade flows related to offshored activities using gravity equations augmented by ad hoc measures of supply-side country differences. This...

This paper explores social models in Europe with focus on the new EU Member States in a comparative perspective. The analysis is based on indicators representing the main tasks of social models. Principal components analysis yields three synthetic factors that reflect these tasks: the factor...