After the collapse of communism, Eastern and Southeastern European counties have experienced significant changes, especially in terms of transition to market economy was achieved through efforts of liberalization and elimination of all forms of national control. As a consequence, some of the social welfare states in the region, still anchored to the old forms of organization, faced serious diff...

Decentralization can complement market liberalization by strengthening incentives of agents to exploit local information in response to market signals. In China, however, banks centralized lending authority following financial reforms in the mid-1990s. We offer a new theory of financial decentralization in which centralization provides a credible commitment not to refinance bad projects by redu...

This paper questions the conventional wisdom concerning the sequencing of political and economic reforms in developing countries. We exploit the specific situation of frontier-zones as well as the considerable regional variations in culture and economic development in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in order to estimate the impact of market development an...

Using a new set of micro evidence from an original survey of 28 transition countries, we show that democracy increases citizens’ support for the market by guaranteeing compensating justice to inequality-averse agents. Our identification strategy relies on the restriction of the sample to inhabitants of open borders between formerly integrated countries, where people face the same level of marke...

In this paper we examine the interaction between the different modes of market access commitments in services (cross-border and establishment) market structure, and regulation. In this context, we focus on the impact of improved domestic market access for a foreign service provider on a domestic service market. We work with a model where the domestic industry is assumed to be imperfectly compet...

Electricity market liberalization aims to boost competition at the level of each member state as well as within the European Union (EU). Therefore, observing the strategic behavior of the market players (e.g. related to net access, cooperation or refusal to collaborate, etc.) becomes crucial. There are different mathematical models for describing the behaviour of a competitive market. For the s...

Community competition policy utilizes four main instruments in order to contribute to the realization of these prerequisites: classical antitrust (prohibition of cartels and abuses of dominant positions), merger control, supervision of enterprises entrusted with special or exclusive rights, and State aid control. Energy liberalization requires the comprehensive use of all four instruments in or...