Книги

Economic reforms have induced different output and productivity changes in Russia, China and the transition countries of Eastern Europe. The main objective of this paper is to analyze what has caused these differences in performance. We discuss how initial conditions and reform policy choices affect changes in property rights, production organization, terms of trade, and the liberalization of the economy. We analyze how these, in turn, have affected economic performance.

The hypotheses are tested by quantitative analysis. We conclude that it is a combination of both initial conditions and reform policy choices which has caused the differences in performance.

This paper analyzes the causes of the differences in transition performance in agriculture. The analysis draws on three empirical studies in which we estimated the impact of reform policies and initial conditions, and their 'intermediate results', (i.e. changes in relative prices, farm restructuring, changes in property rights and overall economic liberalization), on performance, i.e. agricultural productivity and output.

Two studies (Macours and Swinnen, 1999, 2000b) use aggregate data for 15 transition countries (as presented in figure 3); the third (Macours and Swinnen, 2000a) uses annual data on crop output for eight CEECs.

This paper examines the production mode choices of rural households with an emphasis on the Role of human capital in the agricultural transformation process. Farm restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe has resulted in a broad range of farm types, such as co-operatives, partnerships, individual farms and combinations of those. The fact that resources are allocated into different production organization modes is attributed to the utility maximization strategy of heterogeneous agents deriving income from uncertain sources in the face of absent or imperfect factor markets. Empirical results from a multinomial logit model estimated with data from two-year nation-wide survey of Romanian farm households support the hypothesis that the outcome of the transformation process depends primarily on both the human capital characteristics of and economic risks faced by the households.