The paper examines the nature of the Bulgarian banking and currency crises in 1996-1997 and evaluates the causal link between them. The analysis shows that the banking crisis has resulted from slow structural reforms, inefficient prudential regulation and prolonged unsound lending practices. The...

The identification of a possible European business cycle has been inconclusive and is complicated by the enlargement to the new member states and their transition to market economies. This paper shows how to decompose a business cycle into a time-frequency framework in a way that allows us to...

This study evaluates the effects of the current Euro-Mediterranean Free Trade Agreement for the EU and the Mediterranean region, in order to assist policy makers in defining the next steps in the Euro-Mediterranean Road map till 2010 and beyond. It provides quantitative, qualitative and sectoral...

The project intended to explain the causes of high structural unemployment in Poland. It is generally believed that the high level of unemployment in Poland is determined to a decisive degree by factors such as a restrictive labor code, high degree of unionization and/or the unemployment...

This volume contains the output of country research undertaken in Slovenia in 2000-2001 by a team directed by Andreja Bohm and Marko Simoneti under the international comparative project "Secondary Privatization: the Evolution of Ownership Structures of Privatized Enterprises". The project was...

The banking sector in transition economies deserves a special attention of policy makers and the public. The first reason for this attention is that financial intermediation plays a special role in an economy: it channels financial savings of enterprises and households into investments. There is...

This volume contains the output of country research undertaken in Poland in 2000-2001 by Barbara Blaszczyk, Michal Gorzynski, Tytus Kaminski and Bartlomiej Paczoski under the international comparative project "Secondary Privatization: the Evolution of Ownership Structures of Privatized...

This study investigates the HBS effect in a panel of nine CEECs during 1993:Q1-2003:Q4 (unbalanced panel). Prior to estimating the model, we analyze several key assumptions of the model (e.g. wage equalisation, PPP and sectoral division) and elaborate on possible consequences of their failure to...

The present report summarises the outcome of a research project carried out jointly by researchers of the Polish Center for Social and Economic Research Foundation (CASE) and the German Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW) and funded by the Volkswagen foundation. The objective of this...