Building Market Institutions in South Eastern Europe

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.