Working Paper
Decentralized Socialism and Macroeconomic Stability
Using a survey of 300 state-owned enterprises (SOEs), we argue that the acceleration of inflation in China after 1984 was caused by the decentralization reforms in the state sector. These reforms allowed the SOEs to realize their innate tendencies to...
Working Paper
The Political Economy of Industrial Development in Vietnam
Vietnam’s industrial development since doi moi is a success, but only a partial one. This paper provides a political economy account of Vietnam’s industrial growth since 1986. It shows that the key determinant of Vietnam’s industrial growth lies in...
Blog
Varying Growth Trajectories of the West and the South: The Role of Inequality and Institutions
by
Vladimir Popov
August 2014
27 August 2014 Vladimir Popov Modern economic growth started in the West, not because of the efficiency of various capitalist institutions...
Working Paper
The Demographic Transformation of Post-Socialist Countries
The formerly socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union have experienced a remarkable demographic transformation in the past twenty years. On many dimensions of fertility and family formation, much of the region now looks like...
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
New Light on China’s Rural Elites
This paper analyses political elites, economic elites, hybrid elite households and non-elite households in rural China using household data for 1995 and 2002. We seek to understand the determinants of belonging to each of the three elite categories...
Working Paper
Mozambique’s Elite – Finding its Way in a Globalized World and Returning to Old Development Models
What makes elites developmental instead of predatory? We argue that Mozambique’s elite was developmental at independence 35 years ago. With pressure and encouragement from international forces, it became predatory. It has now partly returned to its...
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
Into the Void
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...
Working Paper
The New Grand Bourgeoisie under Post-Communism
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...
Working Paper
Twenty Years Later and the Socialist Heritage is still Kicking
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...
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...