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The opening of borders in eastern Europe, accompanied by partial re-regulation and institutionalization of markets, created exceptional conditions for arbitrage in the form of cross-border trading. Whilst there is evidence that this is in decline in Central Eastern Europe, because of developments in the formal retail sector and convergence in trading and consumption, it persists as a significant alternative economic site in many other parts of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. This article explores three main aspects of cross-border trading in Trans-Carpathian Ukraine, a region at the frontier between `colliding' economic systems. The article has three main objectives. First, it examines the roles of gatekeepers and operators, and their embeddedness in local economic and political systems. Secondly, based on a survey of 150 Ukrainian traders, it explores the socio-economic backgrounds and practices of the traders, especially gender differences, their modes of trading and capital accumulation. These are partly interpreted in terms of the uneven legacy of capital and social networks dating from the state socialist period. Thirdly, it considers the changing organizational forms of trading, especially a shift from petty cross-border trading to global sourcing of merchandise.

This article addresses the remarkable growth of Vietnamese market trading in Central and Eastern Europe, notably Slovakia, in the early 1990s, and its subsequent decline. The literature on ethnic entrepreneurship and cross-border petty trading provides partial insights into this phenomenon, but fails to explain the levels of concentration of the Vietnamese in market trading, or the rapid changes in this sector. We therefore conceptualize them as being at the nexus of shifting flows of capital, goods and people, and draw on the notion of transnational spaces.

Migration decisions are complex, involving both economic and non-economic considerations, and are oftenmade in conditions that depart significantly from the idealised information assumptions of many models. This paper uses a three-stage experimental research design to analyse migrant decision making in the face of complexity and varying information conditions (complete, imperfect, and overloading). It pays particular attention to differences based on previous migration experiences. It focuses on four main issues: (a) the balance between monetary and non-monetary factors; (b) the computation, via a range of methods, of relative decision weights attached to different factors; (c) the impact of country image in relation to information; and (d) the role of preferences in dealing with missing information. The research examines the decision weights for eight attributes of potential destination countries for a sample of 157 young, educated individuals in Slovakia. The relative advantages and challenges of utilising experimental methods in migration research are illustrated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Risk shapes, and is shaped by, migration: although widely acknowledged, this is unevenly, and mostly only implicitly, theorised and analysed. Starting from the distinction between risk and uncertainty, the paper contrasts the different approaches of economics and sociology to theorising risk, in terms of scale, social constructionism, and being informed by risk as opposed to being at risk. It reviews the extent to which six theoretical approaches have been, and could be, applied to migration, risk, and uncertainty: human capital, risk tolerance, new economics of migration, risk and culture, risk society, and governmentality. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the literature on the established determinants of productivity in the retail sector. It also draws attention to some neglected strands of research which provide useful insights into strategies that could allow productivity enhancements in this area of the economy. To date, very few attempts have been made to integrate different specialisms in order to explain what drives productivity in retail. Here this paper rectifies this omission by putting together studies from economics, geography, knowledge management and employment studies. It is the authors’ view that quantitative studies of retail productivity should focus on total factor productivity in retailing as the result of competition/composition effects, planning regulations, information and communications technology, the multinational operation element and workforce skills. Further, the fact that retail firms possess advantages that are transferable between locations suggests that investment in strategies enhancing the transfer of explicit and tacit knowledge between and within businesses are crucial to achieve productivity gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores four aspects of the underdeveloped conceptualization of the role of international migration in uneven regional development and polarization in cities. First, it emphasizes the way in which human mobility transfers not only human capital but also knowledge and material capital, and that these are interrelated. Second, it considers how changes in the nature of mobility have implications for uneven regional development. Third, it develops the concept of enfolded mobilities, as a way of understanding how individual migrations are directly enfolded with those of other individuals, either through associated or contingent movements, or through consequential migration at later stages in the life course. Finally, it discusses how governance impinges on and mediates the key relationships between mobility and uneven regional development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on the study that examined privatization and the development of tourism in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Analysis of the scale, mechanisms, and emergent ownership forms in the tourism sector in Central Europe; Economic consequences of privatization; Diversity of property rights, market segmentation, and the capital and debt structures of firms; Analysis of the value of the concept of recombinant property.