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Conclusively, in 1992, the Soviet Union broke up and its 15 Republics gained independence. After the initial, difficult transition from planned to market economy, the Republics have shown different development paths. This paper analyses their degree of economic development. Following the growing interest in new and better measures of development, we elaborate an index of development, the Ex-Soviet Development Index (ESDI), based on a set of variables from the World Development Indicators database released by the World Bank. To do this, we select the variables through principal component analysis and calculate the ESDI using factorial analysis. Therefore, to test the well-supported hypothesis that good governance has a key positive impact on development, we compare the ESDI with a proposed index of governance, the Ex-Soviet Governance Index (ESGI), elaborating data from the Worldwide Governance Indicators database of the World Bank. The correlation between ESDI and ESGI is shown being high as expected, and this allow us thinking that, in order to classify countries in classes, a cluster analysis with the two indices makes sense. The correlation between ESDI and GDP growth is almost zero. This confirms that the concept of socio-economic performance and development expressed by ESDI cannot be reduced to the growth rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we examine the importance of financial and other obstacles to innovation in the Netherlands using statistical information from the CIS 3.5 innovation survey. We report results on the effect of these obstacles on the firms’ decision to abandon, prematurely stop, seriously slow down, or not to start an innovative project. These results are compared with those from other studies in the Netherlands and other countries. We end with a discussion of policy measures that have been taken to overcome, or at least attenuate these obstacles, such as R&D tax incentives, venture capital financing and policy mix packages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the disintegration of the Soviet Union several new states were founded, and majority of them created the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) while three Baltic states decided about independent path of development so now they are member states of EU. The aim of the paper is to evaluate the level of economic development of 10 countries, that previously were Soviet Union republic. The evaluation procedure is provided applying taxonomic indicators constructed on the basis of 12 variables observed for each country in years 1995-2009. Aggregated measure values are used to classify the investigated states into four classes containing countries with similar level of economic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the factors behind the stable socio-economic atmosphere which pervaded Uzbekistan following the collapse of the Soviet Union. According to the author, the early years of the transition period usually result to a bleak economic growth in most states who were left to carry on following the Soviet collapse. However, the case of Uzbekistan aroused confusion among political and economic analysts on account of the fact that the country did not experience the same fate as the other Central Asian states. Uzbekistan had persistent economic growth during the early years of the transition period. The phenomenon came to be known as the Uzbek puzzle.