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Publications (26)
Working Paper
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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 culture is affected by the long run historical past, in...
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– Lessons from Transition
The paper explores a phenomenon often observed in transition economies, when newly established institutions are misused, i.e., applied or resorted to for reasons which have little in common with their intended or anticipated purpose. In such incidences institutions become sources of private gains...
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– Governing Finance in Central and Eastern Europe
Twenty years after the fall of the iron curtain—which for decades had separated East from West—most countries of Central and Eastern Europe are now members of the European Union; some have even adopted the euro. Nonetheless, these countries have also remained exceptionally vulnerable to upset...
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– Central Europe, Russia and China Compared
In the former socialist redistributive economies, the transition to market economy and the conversion to private ownership followed different trajectories. The paper offers an overview on how a new class of grand bourgeoisie was formed in three different regions of the transition: Central Europe...
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– An Analysis Using Panel Household Survey Data, 1990-2005
This paper, using for the first time household survey data from 26 post-communist countries, covering the period 1990-2005, examines correlates of unprecedented increases in inequality registered by most of these economies. We find that, after controlling for country-fixed effects and type of survey...
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– The Case of Russia
Only recently, 20 years after transition to a market system, has Russia regained a similar production level it had achieved on the eve of transition in 1991. This may sound surprising, given its low productivity under central planning which dropped even lower during the last decades, and the rather...
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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. Performance over the two decades has been determined by...
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– Understanding Economic Development and Institutional Change
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 implement a swift transition to a market economy...
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– The Great Transition
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 dissident activities in 27 former communist countries...
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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 features of consolidated autocracy. This study...
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– Where Russia Now Stands
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 countries in Europe and Asia? It is argued that it...
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– Policy Lessons from Recent Experience
This paper investigates the macroeconomic challenges created by a surge in aid inflows. It develops an analytical framework for examining possible policy responses to increased aid, in terms of absorption and spending of aid—where the central bank controls absorption through monetary policy and the...
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– Looking at the Aid-Social Capital-Growth Nexus
We examine the impact of institutional quality and social capital on aid effectiveness. We find strong evidence that social capital and institutions enhance aid effectiveness. Moreover, once we account for the role of social capital and institutions, the impact of policies tend to disappear. These...
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This paper analyses three issues in strategic donor-recipient interaction motivated by the complexity of the rationale underlying aid. The first is when we have several principals with conflicting objectives. Any one principal cannot offer high powered incentives to the agent to carry out their...
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– Incentives for a Pro-Poor Policy
We develop a theoretical model of foreign aid to analyse a method of disbursement of aid which induces the recipient government to follow a more pro-poor policy than it otherwise would do. In our two-period model, aid is given in the second period and the volume of it depends on the level of...
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The ultimate measure of aid effectiveness is how aid affects the lives of poor people in developing countries. The huge literature on aid’s macroeconomic impact has remarkably little to say on this topic, and less still in terms of practical advice to government officials and aid administrators on...
Displaying 16 of 26 results