Transition has involved major job destruction and creation. This paper examines the skill content of these changes using a detailed three country firm survey. It shows that transition has exerted a strong bias against unskilled labour who have lost employment disproportionately. Moreover, job...

The migration of skilled individuals from developing countries has typically been considered to be costly for the sending country, due to lost investments in education, high fiscal costs and labour market distortions. Economic theory, however, raises the possibility of a beneficial brain drain...

It is widely accepted that the costs of underpricing energy are large, whether in advanced or developing countries. This paper explores how large these costs can be by focussing on the size of the external effects that energy subsidies in particular generate in two important sectors?transport...

This paper analyses the incidence and growth of non-monetary transactions - barter, veksels, debt offsets, tax offsets and other monetary surrogates - in Russia. The empirical backbone of the paper is a survey of 350 - predominantly industrial - firms, carried out in October and November 1998....

The informal economy has burgeoned in many transition economies but particularly in the Former Soviet Union. While the variation in the size of the informal economy has been related to differences in tax regimes and the degree of transparency in the legal and commercial system the causality is...

This paper proceeds from two key assumptions. The first is that European countries are likely to face increased immigration of individuals. The second is that the emigration of jobs from Europe to other regions of the world through offshoring is also likely to increase. It has been widely argued...

Soviet era firms provided generous social benefits, including health and child care. Despite recent cuts, firm survey data show that benefits have remained a majorcomponent of total compensation. With benefits largely firm- specific and firms dominated by insiders, continuing attachment of...

The paper uses a large household dataset -- the Russia Longitudinal Monitoring survey -- to measure inequality and poverty in Russia since the start of transition in 1992. What emerges is that inequality had already emerged by 1992 and has grown subsequently. By 1996 the Gini for Russia was...

This paper analyzes the causes and consequences of non-monetary transactions in Russia, drawing on a large enterprise survey. We show that barter and offsets are linked to liquidity problems at the level of the firm and to arrears in particular. We find evidence that the state has channeled...

We analyze a large stratified random sample of firms that provide us with measures of performance and each firm's top manager's perception of the severity of business environment constraints faced by his/her firm. Unlike most existing studies that rely on external and aggregated proxy measures...