Major changes have occurred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment, and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services policy reforms. The authors find that reforms in policies toward financial and infrastructure services, including telecommunications, power, and transport, are highly correlated with inward foreign direct investment. Controlling for regressors commonly used in the growth literature, they find that measures of services policy reform are statistically significant explanatory variables for the post-1990 economic performance of transition economies. These findings suggest services policies should be considered more generally in empirical analyses of economic growth.

Major changes have occurred in the structure of former centrally planned economies, including a sharp rise in the share of services in GDP, employment and international transactions. However, large differences exist across transition economies with respect to services intensity and services policy reforms. We find that reforms in policies towards financial and infrastructure services, including telecommunications, power and transport, are highly correlated with inward FDI. Controlling for regressors commonly used in the growth literature, we find that measures of services policy reform are statistically significant explanatory variables for the post-1990 economic performance of transition economies. These findings suggest services policies should be considered more generally in empirical analyses of economic growth.

Tiivistelmä.

Why are some nations wealthy while others are desperately poor? Despite the rapid advancement of technology and the free flow of information provided by computers, many poor nations are falling further behind the wealthy nations of the world. Why is it that these poorer nations cannot catch up? Until recently, economic theory provided limited help in answering these questions. But the New Institutional Economics, a rapidly growing body of economic theory, may provide the answers. Timothy Yeager's Institutions, Transition Economies, and Economic Development clearly explains the New Institutional Economics, and applies its tenets to the transition economies of Poland and Russia. Readers will gain a perspective on transition and developing economies that has never been explored before in a single book.

Which political and institutional factors trigger reforms that enable the poor to benefit from the process of economic growth? How can the incentives of policy makers be influenced in order to achieve such a dynamic? These are the questions this study seeks to address by examining the transition process in post-communist countries. The author argues that political competition within an accepted and respected institutional environment has been a driving force in shaping the direction and success of transition reforms. Evidence shows that in countries with a sufficient degree of political competition, citizens responded to economic crises by calling for economic liberalization. Economic liberalization removed existing distortions, increased economic efficiency and raised public welfare. This activated a dynamic, self-enforcing reform process that also strengthened the political and economic power of the poor. In the absence of political competition, such a process failed to emerge, thereby contributing to the persistence of poverty. Based on these findings, there is good reason to postulate that some level of political competition is essential for transition reforms to improve economic efficiency and public welfare in a sustainable manner.

The competitiveness of firms in open economies is increasingly determined by access to low-cost and high-quality producer services - telecommunications, transport and distribution services, financial intermediation, etc. This paper discusses the role of services in economic growth, focusing in particular on channels through which openness to trade in services may increase productivity at the level of the economy as a whole, industries and the firm. The authors explore what recent empirical work suggests could be done to enhance comparative advantage in the production and export of services and how to design policy reforms to open services markets to greater foreign participation in a way that ensures not just greater efficiency but also greater equity in terms of access to services.