The purpose of this paper is the following: firstly, to chart how much economic reform of CEE electricity industries has taken place to date; secondly, to discuss why progress has been so limited; and, thirdly, to consider the prospects over the next few years. In charting the economic progress to date, we will consider and discuss progress in electricity price unbundling and rebalancing; in ut...

During the past three decades, the insurance industry has developed from a virtually nonexistent industry to a large, open industry. This fast growing economy coupled with the largest population in the world, rising personal income, and economic system reform could not only explain the rapid growth of China's insurance industry, but also foretell the increasing importance of China's insurance m...

Our study examined the consequences of the economic reform programme on poverty and survival strategies in Ethiopia since 1989, with an emphasis on the rural economy. We used a very detailed household panel data set covering about 1450 households in 15 villages in rural Ethiopia, supplemented with some primary and secondary sociological and anthropological data. The emphasis has been on disenta...

The objective of this paper is to examine the nature of India’s federal system, the reforms that have occurred over the last ten years, and what remains to be done. We begin by briefly describing the key federal institutions in India, focusing particularly on the mechanisms for center-state transfers. These transfers are quite large, and are the major explicit method for dealing with inequaliti...

This paper aims to develop an integrated analytical framework for revolution, reform, and involution under dictatorship based on China’s history. In order to grasp the essence of political and economic interactions in historic China, this paper gets some abstract variables from China’s history, on the basis of which a political economy model is built. The autocrat plays an important role in det...

This paper provides a self-contained overview of the present problems of state finances in India. It begins with an overview of historical evolution and current institutional structures, including economic, political, administrative and fiscal aspects of India’s federal system. The paper then reviews the current situation of India’s state government finances, going on to consider various develo...

In this paper, we propose a new concept of convergence which is based on the metric entropy measure recently proposed by Granger et al. (2004) to investigate economic convergence in China. This entropy measure compares whole distributions of growth rates across individual provinces. Separately, based on this same entropy measure, we also implement cluster analysis to identify any convergence cl...

I survey the first twenty-five years of economic change in the former communist countries after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While diverging sharply from one another, these countries have converged economically and politically towards their nearest neighbors outside the Soviet bloc. The typical country experienced a spurt of economic reform in the early 1990s, slowing dramatically from around 1...

This paper is prepared for presentation at the ABCDE Europe Workshop " Development Thinking at the Millennium, " organized by the World Bank and to be held in Paris, June 26-28, 2000. The author is thankful to Richard Newfarmer for his comments and to David Bisbee for his editorial assistance. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do ...