A growing and deepening divide has opened up between countries where economic development has “taken off” and those caught in a vicious cycle of institutional backwardness and macroeconomic instability. This “Great Divide” is visible in almost every measure of economic performance, such...

The majority of enterprises in China are controlled by local governments at the provincial, city, county, township and village levels. We study the effect of regional decentralization on soft budget constraints in these enterprises. We show that fiscal competition under (foreign) capital...

China's economic transition has reached a stage where the past experimental approach is no longer sufficient. Future policy reforms need to be carried out in a holistic rather than a piecemeal manner. This paper analyzes the reforms of two related institutions in China: the household...

This study addresses the effects of economic, demographic and institutional factors on land allocation between forestry and other uses. A panel data set from Hainan Island in China and a generalized least squares estimation method, allowing individual effects for counties, are applied. The...

Each of the four countries analyzed in this study has gone through a transition period since the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s. Each has tried different strategies to change their economies and each has different results. The purpose of this paper is to explore and compare the...

The paper analyses the evolution of similarity between EU 15 agri-food exports and those of the new member States (Nms) and Turkey to the EU market. The main goal is to highlight, with the help of similarity indicators that take into account the structural, absolute value and quality differences...

This paper aims to test empirically if certain frequently used measures of well-being, which are regarded as valuable properties of human life, are actually desired by people. In other words, it investigates whether the “expert judgments” in social science overlap with social consensus on...

The evolving and diverging challenges for the well-being of children after two decades of transition are examined. Following a long period of sustained economic growth and gradual improvements in living standards, the global economic crisis is now threatening to reverse some of the recent...

Die Wirtschaft der DDR war eine Ökonomie des Mangels. Im Jahr 1989 stand sie nicht weit vom Abgrund entfernt - paradoxerweise deshalb, weil die DDR über ihre Verhältnisse gelebt hatte. Im Zentrum der Politik stand über viele Jahre die konsumtive Verwendung der Wirtschaftsleistung; der Konsum...