Suchergebnisse

Newly industrialized countries and transition economies are often perceived as a threat to Western countries in public discussion, and concerns about economic 'competitiveness' arise. The present paper focuses on the specific macro-economic term 'price competitiveness'. It analyzes the underlying assumptions of the term, explainshow the 'price competitiveness' indicator is composed, and what the restrictions arewhen applying it to transition economies. When calculating the 'price competitiveness' indicator for Central and Eastern European New Member States of the European Union in the last decade, all ten countries show values that are conventionally understood as a steady 'loss in price competitiveness'. Still, this has not led to lower export growth in the last decade in these countries. Instead, all ten assessed countries show above-average growth in Exports, in Manufacturing goods, and in Gross Domestic Product, compared to the rest of the world.The 'price competitiveness' indicator fails, due to inherent assumptions and technical implications, to explain the Export development in economies that are fastgrowing and going through a process of industrialization - so called 'catch-up economie' - what has been the case in the Central and Eastern European countries in the last decade. The 'price competitiveness' indicator should thus not be applied irrespectively of a country's economic situation.

Starting from the observation that some of the East European post-socialist governments produced coherent reform policies which successfully transformed their countries' economies into capitalist ones, while others lingered behind muddling through half hearted reforms, this paper takes a closer look at how these governments simultaneously developed the banking sector and the large scale privatization. The guiding question of the project is: Why do some governments of CEE produce coherent reforms of banking sector and large scale privatization, while others were less successful? In order to answer this question, the author analyses the policies of the governments of the ten Central and Eastern European countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia) between 1990 and 2004. The project starts from the assumption that governments caught in extended accountability networks and whose authority is constrained by other institutions are likely to produce coherent policies. It shows that the ability for producing coherent reforms is the result of a combination between the characteristics of governments and context conditions. In particular, it shows that the governments produced coherent reforms in presence of favourable combinations of contextual factors, even if their own characteristics are not facilitating the production of coherent policies.