Economists have moved in recent years beyond analyzing the manner in which the macroeconomies of different countries function and prescribing appropriate policies for dealing with domestic and external imbalances. Increasingly, they have sought to understand the complex interaction between political and economic phenomena. This book considers issues of economic reform in a broad range of settings:

* developed countries
* transition countries
* developing countries

Using country specific cases such as Uzbekistan, Burma and Haiti, it focuses on those...

The nine essays collected here examine ethnic relations, discrimination, and affirmative action in different regions of the world. The contributors focus throughout on the political economy of ethnic relations - an area that has until now been largely neglected in the literature. Written by economists, the papers both offer theoretical and empirical insights into standard neoclassical models of discrimination and explore in depth the historical and institutional features of the specific cases under study. Six of the papers address discrimination and affirmative action in developing...

The end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s have witnessed the disintegration of all three formerly communist federal nations, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia. These events have resulted in the creation of 22 new nations, raising all sorts of interesting questions. This volume is concerned with the first steps toward economic independence of a selection of these states, including Estonia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Georgia, as well as the former Yugoslavia republics of Slovenia, Croatia and Macedonia, and Slovakia. While their experiences vary greatly, they face...