This article explores how the recent changes in Cuba, specifically reforming the foreign investing laws (Law No. 118), are likely to affect the future of international franchising in Cuba. Special attention is given to legal reforms, economic impacts, growth of entrepreneurs, and the likelihood...

This paper presents new evidence on the dynamics of dollarization and euroization for twenty-five transition countries. Estimates of the amount of foreign currency in circulation (FCC) in transition countries are used to develop a new comprehensive dollarization index (CDI) and separate indices...

Institutional competition stirs the interest of economists following a certain cyclical pattern. In this context, it is very interesting to look back at the experience of Lenin and the Bolsheviks of adopting monetary competition to stabilize their political and economic power after the crash of...

Coverage of Russia in western newspapers leaves an overriding impression that the place is corrupt and doomed. Economists and pundits have focused on corruption, and the lack of the rule of law as the main causes of last year's crash. These structural problems definitely exist and they are...

The paper discusses recent changes in central bank laws and the relationship between inflation and central bank independence in transition economies. Two indices of legal independence are constructed, covering political and economic aspects of independence. Most of the countries experienced...

Here the author empirically estimates if the different monetary and exchange rate frameworks observed in the Accession Countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltics do yield different outcomes in terms of level and variance of a set of nominal and real variables. The author follows and...

A general consensus in the transition economies literature links the existence of enterprise restructuring with the pace of the transition process and the potential for economic growth. The existing literature is less clear, however, about whether the lack of economic growth is caused by the...

This paper examines the moderation of inflation in three transition economies, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland at the end of the 1990s. We argue that the institutions for the conduct of monetary policy in these countries were relatively weak and that monetary policy was unsupported by...

The paper reviews legal, institutional and enforcement problems behind the lack of collateral credit to private firms in the early transition in Bulgaria. It also quantifies the cost of these problems and outlines an approach to reform of collateral institutions in order to increase the supply...

The papers in the present SUERF Study is a selection of the papers presented at a SUERF Workshop and Special OeNB East Jour Fixe on the Russian financial system held at Oesterreichische Nationalbank in Vienna on 23 January 2009