Randi Ryterman

Building Market Institutions in South Eastern Europe, a collaborative effort of the World Bank and the EBRD, analyses the institutional impediments to investment and growth in eight SEE countries - Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, FYR Macedonia, Moldova, Romania, and Serbia and Montenegro - and suggests policy reforms to ease these constraints. The analysis focuses on four core issues: (i) Business competition and economic barriers to entry/exit, (ii) Access to regulated utilities and services, (iii) Corporate ownership, financial transparency and access to finance, and (iv) Commercial dispute resolution. These issues are investigated empirically across the SEE countries to allow for cross-country comparisons and to develop a regional perspective on corresponding policy challenges. The study is innovative not only because of its use of a cross-country comparative analytical framework applied to a well-defined - and politically important - region, but also because of the novel way it marries data from several sources: (i) official data from the eight countries; (ii) two rounds of results (for 1999 and 2002) of a quantitative firm-level survey (EBRD-World Bank Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey) covering approximately 1600 SEE firms; and (iii) the results from a set of 40 original enterprise-level business case studies developed in the field in each of the eight countries. Building Market Institutions in South Eastern Europe provides new insights on improving the South East European business environment and suggests concrete policy recommendations.

Controlling corruption is an essential part of good governance and poverty reduction, and it poses an enormous challenge for governments all around the world. Anticorruption in Transition 2 analyzes patterns and trends in corruption in business-government interactions in the transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. It points to some encouraging signs that the magnitude and negative impact that corruption exerts on businesses may be declining in many countries in the region. It also shows how some types of firms - most notably small private ones - encounter more corruption than others, and it underscores the importance of policy and institutional reforms in achieving long-term success in the fight against corruption. The longer-term sustainability of recent improvements is not certain, however, and the challenges ahead remain formidable.