ABSTRACT

Chapter 3 touches on macroeconomic dynamics in CEE and FSU countries during the transition period. Immediately after the collapse of socialism, these countries plunged into a serious economic crisis called the “transformational recession” (Kornai 1994) and then slowly recovered from it. In other words, all of these countries, without exception, followed a J-curved growth path. There were, however, considerable differences among these countries in terms of the depth and length of the crisis and the speed of economic recovery. To understand how the J-curved growth path occurred in the first place, this chapter performs a meta-analysis using 3,279 estimates extracted from 123 previous studies. The meta-synthesis of the extracted estimates revealed that, while the growth-enhancing effects of structural change and transformation policy were small yet significant, inflation and regional conflict had a highly significant and strongly negative effect on output. In addition, the legacy of socialism might exacerbate the decline in production in the early stages of transition. The meta-regression analysis that simultaneously controls for various research conditions and the assessment of publication selection bias provides supporting evidence for the results obtained from the meta-synthesis.