ABSTRACT
The most crucial economic characteristics involve resource constraints and/or inefficient allocation, and infrastructural decay that has a critical effect on transitional societies increased vulnerability to crises and precipitated the specificity of crisis development paths in such societies. The most salient political, institutional and socio-cultural features are weak or uneven/unstable institutions, primarily laws and regulations, the shadow of authoritarianism, discrepancies and conflicts between public values and norms accompanied by intra- and inter-community strain and changing mass media cultures. In addition the banking crises which occurred in Estonia, Latvia and Russia in the 1990s paralleled in some respects those that took place after waves of deregulation in Sweden and the United States of America (USA) in the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the property redistribution in various industries and issues of social security, including the privileges of the Chernobyl rescuers in Russia. The degree to which the media take on a watchdog role in different emerging economies varies considerably.
