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During the 30 years of transition from communist regimes, the people's views towards transition have varied from support to opposition. We empirically examine the influences of international labour migration on these views, using the survey data covering 28 transition countries in Europe and the former Soviet Union area and three points of time, 2006, 2010 and 2016, based on multivariate regression models. Our main findings are twofold. (I) Labour emigration to Western Europe increased people's support for a market economy and democracy over a planned economy and authoritarian government, albeit a less robust result for democracy. This suggests the role of social remittances – migrants transmit their experiences and promote the support for transition among people remaining in the home countries. (II) However, immigrant inflows reduced these support, suggesting that the economic and cultural conflicts with immigrants made people sceptic towards liberal policies or nostalgic towards the communist era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Janos Kornai was the most outstanding economist from the socialist and post-socialist region in the last 50 years. He was a world-renowned scholar who left behind an immense legacy of works published in over 20 languages. His theory of systemic disequilibrium in a centrally planned economy, the concept of hard and soft budget constraints, and economic shortage were of revolutionary importance to the scientific interpretation of the processes of production, distribution and capital accumulation in state socialist economies. Also of note is the author's work on political economy of socialism, which he taught at the Harvard University. When analysing the socialist system, Kornai essentially contented himself with a descriptive approach, whereas in works published after 1989 he focused his attention on normative economics, suggesting directions of structural reform, institution-building, and economic policy in post-socialist transition. Also of great importance is Kornai's last book comparing the disequilibrium characterised by shortage in socialism with the disequilibrium typical of the surplus in capitalism. This article analyses the evolution of this outstanding economist's theoretical thought and its impact on real economic processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a common belief that small towns of formerly socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are suffering a substantial decline due to the better offerings in bigger metropolitan areas and in western countries. This belief has been reinforced by a long transformation process: firstly, the transition from a command economy to capitalism and secondly, the move from manufacturing to service. To investigate this issue, a concentrated research on one territory was conducted, which gives a more intimate picture of the status of rural municipalities in a typical post-communist area of CEE. This information was compared to secondary historical and current data concerning economics, infrastructure, and demographics giving us a picture of the municipalities' viability by creating a multi-criteria analysis. This research indicates that small towns are not suffering precipitous declines, which is a common belief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]