gratefully acknowledged. The arguments expressed in this paper and any remaining errors are, however, solely those of the author. Abstract Most economists and analysts claim that extended use of pollution charges in environmental policy will have substantial efficiency advantages in countries undergoing transition to market economies. Essentially this paper challenges this view and argues that ...

Bank privatization and tighter credit enforcement are believed indispensable to facilitate the Eastern European transition process. We analyze lending by value-maximizing banks, the only source of capital in the transition, faced by non-performing loans to the state-owned sector. We show that banks have a perverse incentive to fund former debtors, although less efficient and more risky, because...

Using fixed effects panel data approach, this paper empirically examines the effects of trade and foreign direct investment (FDI) on growth in 13 transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe, and the Baltic region (CEEB). Our analysis suggests that significant positive effect of trade on growth is a robust result for transition economies of this region. In addition, domestic investment ap...

Among today’s rich economies, per capita output levels diverged before converging to the levels of the frontier economy. Since frontier economies grew at stable rates, non-frontier economies display an S-shaped transition path. Along this transition, there are "catapult effects": longer episodes of stagnation are associated with faster subsequent rates of convergence to the frontier. Many of to...

The results of investigation into similarities and differences between problems of enterprise system (ES) implementation in transition and developed economies are presented. In doing so, the research builds on the opinions of ES practitioners from Poland, a transition economy from Central and Eastern Europe. The main findings suggest that problems in developed economies seemed to be clearly ass...