Working Paper
Economic and non-economic returns to Communist Party membership in Vietnam
Single-party political systems exist in a number of countries, such as China and Vietnam. In these countries, party membership is potentially an important source of economic and social status. This paper investigates these effects and the mechanisms...
Working Paper
Feeding China
China's approach to feeding its 22 per cent of the world population has varied considerably during the 36 years of the People's Republic, and so have the results. In the late 1970s its leadership began repudiating much of the country's earlier...
Working Paper
China's Business Cycles
This paper represents a first attempt to study China’s business cycles using a formal analytical framework, namely, a structural VAR model. It is found that: (a) demand shocks were the dominant source of macroeconomic fluctuations, but supply shocks...
Working Paper
Fifty Years of Regional Inequality in China
This paper constructs and analyses a long-run time-series for regional inequality in China from the Communist Revolution to the present. There have been three peaks of inequality in the last fifty years, coinciding with the Great Famine of the late...
Working Paper
Why Are the Elite in China Motivated to Promote Growth?
Rapid economic development in China in the post-1978 era has been considered 'intriguing' and 'puzzling' since it occurred under the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party – the fusion of politics and economics is supposed to be a powerful...
Working Paper
The Long-Run Weight of Communism or the Weight of Long-Run History?
This study provides evidence that culture understood as values and beliefs moves very slowly. Despite massive institutional change, values and beliefs in transition countries have not changed much over the last 20 years. Evidence suggests that...
Working Paper
Central Asia after Two Decades of Independence
After becoming independent in 1991, the five Central Asian countries pursued differing transition paths from the defunct central planning. This paper analyses the connection between economic policies and performance during the 1990s and 2000s...
Working Paper
Innovation and Dynamism
Literature on post-socialist transformation usually deals with the political, economic and social sides of it, although there have also been important changes in the field of technical advance in the last 20 years. One of capitalism’s main virtues is...
Working Paper
Transition, Structural Divergence, and Performance
During the socialist era the communist regime attempted to reduce development differentials among states and social classes. In contrast, during the last 20 years, the economies in transition experienced considerable divergence in the economic...
Working Paper
Twenty Years of Political Transition
What explains the divergent political paths that the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have followed since the fall of the Berlin Wall? While some appear today to be consolidated democracies, others have all the...
Working Paper
The Long Road to Normalcy
The goal of this study is to reveal the long-term trajectory of Russian economic development and to make predictions for the future. The study starts with a much discussed question: why Russia did worse economically during transition than most other...
Working Paper
Transition in Southeast Europe
The paper analyses the 20-year experience with transition in the SEE countries in a comparative framework, illustrating how these countries encountered difficulties in its implementation, despite having some of the best starting conditions in 1989 to...
Working Paper
Civil Society, Institutional Change and the Politics of Reform
This paper examines the relationship between differences in civil society development under communism and the political, economic and institutional change and transformation after 1989. We collected a unique dataset on nature and intensity of...
Working Paper
Lessons from the Transition Economies
Why many transition economies succeeded by pursuing policies that are so different from the radical economic liberalization (shock therapy) that is normally credited for the economic success of central European countries? First, optimal policies are...