TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the role of transportation costs in causing the countries of Central Asia to generate far less trade with the European Union than their relative location would suggest and detected a sharp increase in the transportation costs and time at Warsaw, moving east from the EU towards the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).

TL;DR: In this paper, the equilibrium exchange rates of three South Eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania), of two CIS economies (Russia and Ukraine) and of Turkey are investigated.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors estimate and simulate sustainable real exchange rates in some of the new EU accession countries point to potential difficulties in sustaining the ERM2 regime if entered too soon and with weak policies.

TL;DR: This article examined the relationship between national saving and investment and found strong support for systematic effects of country-size as well as openness on the saving-investment relationship in a panel of 126 economies over the period 1960-2000.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the pitfalls involved in such estimations and endow the reader with the methodological ingredients to avoid such biases and propose a two-stage out-of-sample strategy that consists of estimating the relationship between the exchange rates and fundamentals and the extrapolation of these relationships to transition economies.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors search for the single most decisive structural break in exchange rate for a group of European transition countries under the hypothesis that structural breaks in exchange rates are driven by exchange rate policies.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyse the impact of regionalism and multilateralism on the five Central Asian countries' economic performance and the consequences of the countries' accession to the World Trade Organization.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore three alternative models of multilateral aid for reconciling need and effectiveness: regional aid, the International Development Association's (IDA's) model of concessional loans, and a synthesis model (S-model).

TL;DR: In this article, the authors estimate the equilibrium real exchange rate path for the Slovak koruna and find that the exchange rate was undervalued until recently, as Slovak prices were low even when adjusted for differences in income and productivity.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyzed the enlargement's effect on trade between Russia, old and new Europe's, changes in tariffs and non-tariff barriers, and institutional issues.

TL;DR: In this paper, the scope to foster European Union (EU) energy security through stable long-run economic relations with the Caspian Sea region is explored, which is part of a longer-run research programme focusing on the following issues: what are the determinants of the EU long-term energy interests in the Central Asian region, and how far does genuine security depend not only on diversifying energy sources geographically but also on stable political and economic structures in the energy-exporting states.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors developed a policy-driven growth model and addressed the effects of World Bank lending on economic growth in a sample of 30 countries, after having controlled for the effect of key macroeconomic variables, such as exchange rate, domestic credit growth, and inflation.

TL;DR: The authors used cross-country data on African countries for the 1990-2002 period to examine the impact of the World Bank on human development in poor countries, and found that while loans and grants of the Bank have had a positive impact on some relatively short-term indicators of health and education in an average African country, there is little evidence to suggest that such loans or grants have helped these countries to consolidate on the shortterm gains.

TL;DR: The authors analyzes empirical links between aid flows and regulatory burden and finds that World Bank lending, while not specifically targeting high or low regulatory states, is linked to lower subsequent regulation, and this link holds for multilateral donors more broadly while bilateral donor funds apparently fail to influence the level of regulation.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a general introduction to equilibrium exchange-rate economics in transition economies and discuss the estimation techniques for assessing equilibrium exchange rates, and then provide a short description of the papers in this special issue.

TL;DR: The authors investigated the relationship between inflation and the real exchange rate to the rate of depreciation of the exchange rate for Hungary over 1991m6-2002m2 and found that prior to the adoption of the pre-announced crawl in 1995 depreciation responded to inflation.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors argue that institutions matter and that, given the current level of institutional and infrastructure development in Central Asia, government intervention is necessary to establish a viable economic partnership.

TL;DR: The European Union has a strong interest in fostering sustainable growth in the central Asian economies, one dimension being to underpin its future energy security as mentioned in this paper, which means supporting reforms that can further strengthen economic institutions, catalyze higher levels of FDI outside the energy sector, promote more broadly based economic growth, and promote financial stability.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors compared a vertically integrated labor managed monopoly with a decentralized market arrangement where production is segmented among an upward LM firm producing an input and a downstream LM manufacturer of the final good.

TL;DR: This article used a dynamic heterogeneous panel model to estimate real equilibrium exchange rates for advanced transition countries, and found that exchange rates in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovakia have converged in recent years with real equilibria expressed in the US dollars.

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the relationship between corporate control structures, sales growth and the determinants of employment change in Polish firms and found that privatisation has a positive impact on employment but this is concentrated within a range of 3 to 6 years after privatisation.

TL;DR: This paper provided an empirical investigation on the discrepancies between official and de facto exchange rate regimes in transition economies and found that errors in the selection of official regimes as well as the macroeconomic developments calling for conflicting adjustments in exchange-rate regimes are important determinants of regime discrepancies.

TL;DR: Using an extended version of the Balassa-Samuelson model including the price of oil, the authors found evidence that changes in those terms had a significant effect on the real exchange rate during 1996-2003, suggesting symptoms of significant Dutch disease effects in Kazakhstan.

TL;DR: In this article, a stochastic frontier wage equation is employed to examine labor-market efficiency and estimate workers' potential wages in Russia after a decade of economic reforms using a nationally representative household survey.