This book traces and analyzes the legislation and implementation of pension reforms in four Central, Eastern and Southeastern European countries: Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. By comparing the political economy of their policymaking processes, it seeks to pinpoint regularities between institutional settings, actor constellations, decision-making strategies and reform. Guardiancich employs a historical institutionalist framework to analyze the policies, actors and institutions that characterized the period between the collapse of socialism and the global financial crisis of 2008-2011. He argues that viable pension reforms should not be seen simply as an event, but rather as a continuing process that must be fiscally, socially and politically sustainable. In particular, the primary goal of a pension scheme is to reduce poverty, provide adequate retirement income and insure against the risks of old age within given fiscal constraints, and this will happen only if the scheme enjoys continuing political support at all levels. To this end the author individuates those institutional characteristics of countries that increase the consistency of reforms and lower the likelihood of policy reversals in time. Pension Reforms in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe will be of interest to students and scholars of political science, political economy, social policy and economics.

This book provides a comparative look at financial management systems from a family of systems point of view.

The first part of this book consists of seven chapters which draw lessons for the transforming economies from the experiences of EC member countries (including, Eastern Germany), the U.S., and South-East Asian 'Pacific Rim' countries. The second part of the book contains a further six chapters which focus on the experiences of Poland in the early phase of its transition with regard to privatisation, the microeconomic impact of monetary policy and banking sector reform, and draws lessons for other transforming economies.

This volume examines the accounting issues within Central and Eastern Europe, looking back to the fall of communism (1980s-90s) and its effect on the countries' accounting and business models.

Much has been written about the economic and political problems of countries that are in the process of changing from centrally planned systems to market systems. Most studies have focused on the economic, legal, political and sociological problems these economies have had to face during the transition period. However, not much has been written about the dramatic changes that have to be made to the accounting and financial system of a transition economy. This book was written to help fill that gap. This book is the second in a series to examine accounting and financial system reform in transition economies. The first book used Russia as a case study. The present volume in the series examines some additional aspects of the reform in Russia and also looks at the accounting and financial system reform efforts that are being made in Ukraine, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Armenia and five Central Asian republics.

Can the economics of Eastern Europe make the dramatic transition from centrally-planned to market-led economics? This book tries to understand the intellectual background behind this change and the problems of managing it.