Early transition literature linked large number of firm failures with the inability to overcome the pre-transition misallocation of resources, i.e. the inadequate capital-labor ratio. We look at the link between misallocation and firm survival using a rich firm-level dataset of over 1600 manufacturing plants established in a centrally planned economy after 1945. Our duration models include the standard Olley-Pakes misallocation measures as well as firm-level counterfactual level of capital that takes into account the present day market allocation and productivity. We show that i) misallocation was rather a firm-level than sector-level phenomenon and more importantly ii) it did not have a sizeable effect on the actual firm survival. Moreover, privatization tends to be negatively related to firm survival. This may imply both inappropriate self-selection into privatization programs and possibly inadequate implementation of the privatization.

This paper utilizes our novel dataset on survival of all state manufacturing plants from 1988, details here.

The emergence of global value chains leads to fragmentation of the production processes and reallocation of those processes across countries. With increasing number of production stages, the manufacturing process is located increasingly further away from the consumer. Literature suggests that fragmentation of production increases the international transmission of shocks. The global financial crisis is believed to lead to consolidation and shortening of global value chains and amplification of demand shocks along the global value chains, the so-called bullwhip effect. In this paper we study the effects of global financial crisis on employment, focusing specifically on the role of the distance from final demand (upstreamness) in this adjustment. We find that upstreamness matters for both labor demand and adjustment in employment during the periods of crisis, but this relationship is heterogeneous across countries. While the reaction to the crisis is indeed amplified further away from final demand, contrary to our expectations it is mostly channeled through lower job creation rates rather than faster job destruction. Moreover, the adverse effects of the crisis are lower in foreign firms, this difference does not depend on the distance from final demand.

The pattern of trade of the Central and Eastern European countries has been changing since the beginning of the economic transition in the early 1990s. By the end of the century this process was additionally strengthened by their integration with the European Union and overlapped with the development of global value chains (GVC) spanning across Europe with which the new member states (NMS) have become increasingly integrated.

In this paper, we shed light on these changes by analysing the position of the NMS within the global value chains. We employ the upstreamness measure proposed by Antràs et al. (2012) and use the World Input–Output Database. Although we observe a global increasing trend in the upstreamness of all countries, we find that the NMS have in many cases gone against this trend while converging in their production structure within their group and with the EU-15. This convergence is mostly observed in Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia where the level of upstreamness in the most important exporting sectors was close to that of Germany by the end of the analyzed period 1995–2011.

• This paper uses the WIOD data
• The STATA code used to compute the U measure can be downloaded below. If you use it or any part of it in your research, please, cite our paper. This code assumes that you have all the WIOD data in one Stata file.

In many countries, the fiscal tension associated with the global financial crisis brings about the discussion about unprivatizing the social security system. This article employs an Overlapping Generations model to assess ex ante the effects of such changes to the pension reform in Poland from 1999 as implemented in 2011 and in 2013. We simulate the behaviour of the economy without the implemented/proposed changes and compare it to a status quo defined by the reform from 1999. We find that the changes implemented in 2011 and in 2013 are detrimental to welfare. The effects on capital and output are small and depend on the selected fiscal closure. Implied effective replacement rates are lower. These findings are robust to time inconsistency. The shortsightedness of the governments imposes welfare costs.