It is often said that China's economic transition is successful due to its gradualist approach. But by looking at its total process from much wider perspectives we can see how it is successful and unique vis-à-vis other transition economies. We first surveyed previous methodologies of classifying transition processes, then tried a cluster analysis of 27 transition economies on the basis of seven indicators: 1) approaches employed, 2) ownership and privatization patterns, 3) openness to external economies, 4) political freedom, 5) institutional development, 6) inflation, and 7) growth rate. Our main findings are: (1) transition economies can be classified into three groups, i.e. Central Europe and Baltic countries, Eastern Europe and CIS nations, and East Asia, or China and Vietnam, (2) these groups are corresponding to their geographical locations, (3) they are also corresponding to their growth performance.

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Among many reform agenda, President Putin placed a special emphasis on pension reform because of its social and political significance in the worsening economic situations for the working masses. By setting up a new "National Soviet for Pension Reform", Putin Government tried to consolidate the conflicting views among various social strata which hindered the realization of reform in the past several years. The major difficulties were to find ways to change the old "redistributive" system to the new "funding" system. This article tries to analyze first the basic economic problems facing the reformers and then political and lawmaking process and its latest developments in the year 2001.

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How do we understand the typology of East European economies in transition? This paper tries to answer this question through investigating a variety of studies of the complex transitions occurring in Eastern Europe.
First it challenges making a research model to compare these complexness and differences. Secondly, it investigates studies on the causes of differences descendent from the socialist and pre-socialist period. Thirdly, it examines studies about ones indigenous to the process of transition itself.
Finally it is concluded that transition economies could be categorized and typified in the space that the three dimensions constitute: the degree of cumulative liberalization, the line between the over-withdrawal of the state and its institution-constructive role and the degree of regional integration.

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Russia and Eastern European countries (excluding Albania and former Yugoslav states) can be divided into three groups. The first group includes Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia, which have successfully coordinated macro economic stabilization and liberalization of foreign trade. The second group includes Bulgaria and Romania, where half measures of liberalization have been adopted under the circumstance of vicious spiral of inflation and depreciation of currency. The third group consists of Russia. Russia keeps old complicated organizations in the half liberalized system. One interesting point here is that the first and the third group experienced real currency appreciation in the first years of the transition whereas the currencies of the second group were depreciated considerably.

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Historically, Russia has been unable to establish Rechtsstaat or the state based on "rule of Law". Indeed, Russia's legal culture is characterized by a profound distrust of the law, or "legal nihilism". Furthermore, it should be emphasized that, in addition to legal nihilism, Russia's legal culture is also characterized by the concept of ethical dualism. Ethical dualism means that the moral norms Russians apply in relationships with members of their own community differ from those in relationships with people thought to be associated with a different community. Given such a distinctive nature, Russia's legal culture could not be conceived of as being suited for a market economy. It might be inevitable that the political system tends to be more authoritarian in order to lower transaction costs and facilitate economic development.

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One of the most serious socio-economic problems in Russia has been a problem of nonpayment since 1992. The nonpayment between the government and enterprises endangered normal economic functioning in the country because the government as well as enterprises has accumulated overdue claims each other. Therefore, the pseud-settlement mechanism was formulated for facilitating daily socio-economic life, the example of which represents the triangle (non-) payment relation in providing housing utility services. Though both local government and natural monopolies haven't paid full each other, they can support the daily life of people in the region through utilizing various non-monetary means.

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Without an understanding of the concepts of 'continuity' or 'path dependence' in the socialist economy, we cannot understand why even now in Russia corruption diffuses throughout society. Although there are few surveys which approach the issue from the point of view of 'continuity' or 'path dependence, ' in this article, the relationship between shadow economy and corruption under the period of transition is described. Then my view will be shown, discussing the existence of 'socialistic corruption.' The ubiquity of socialistic corruption in the USSR is one of the most important reasons why corruption also becomes widespread in Russia.

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Uzbekistan is known as a representative model for transition to a market economy. Its decline in GDP was less compared with a model of a radicalism such as Kyrgyz, . However, Uzbekistan faces different challenges for a transition. Industries were organized under the sector-wise "associations" that function as a dual organization, namely, as a belt of control by the government and a fake voluntary association of enterprises. The mechanism could be termed as a cartel under a strong leadership of state, namely a re-organization of state and private enterprises, which does not guarantee an automatic transition to a market economy.

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From 1990 and onwards in Kazakhstan the investment was made mainly in the oil-gas sector and nonferrous metallurgy industry by the FDI. The FDI and donors' assistance are helpful, however, for the needs of expansion of production and investment they are not enough at all. The deposits of individuals in the commercial banks fell drastically and the lending of the commercial banks also fell drastically. Thus current. commercial banks are not working as intermediary institutions. Since there is no functioning market system, it will be necessary to utilize policy based finance (directed credit).

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It is hard to judge that introduction of a new statistical system led to improvement in availability of statistics in Russia today. Though many of problems which Russian price statistics has take place in every country, they occur in the extreme form, because Russia is in a transition process, lacks for experience of producing the price statistics in the market economy and has a vast territory, etc. "Arrears", barter and transactions in dollars, in which ruble is eliminated, are widespread and it has complicated the price system of a country. Such a situation is just a special situation of Russia, and makes the statistical improvement difficult.

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This paper presents a Cournot model analysis for joint venture with cost effects. When a firm enters foreign market, it has an alternative choice between joint ventureand export. First, a relation with cost and joint venture gain is examined. In this situation, a range of cost differences is needed and this gain's change is analyzed. Then, a range of cost difference is less than trade barrier not reduced.

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The Trans-Caspi-gas-Pipeline project, started in February 1999 with the strong support of the U.S., must have enabled its political purpose of reducing the Russian controlling power to the area, and Turkmenistan to secure the gas export route to far abroad. However, the project was deadlocked by Turkmenistan's resuming gas export to Russia via the existing route in 2000. As a reason of Turkmenistan's conversion, it is possible that Turkmenistan could expect Russia to relax the conditions for using the existing route with two factors: recent natural gas shortage in Russia, and its desire to revive political influence to the region. However, expansion of the gas export, through Russia exactly means continuation of Turkmenistan's dependence to it, so it is not regarded as strategically rational. Thus, since Turkmenistan, the country of prediction impossibility, is the main exporter of the area, the future of the natural gas export from the Caspian Sea to the world market is quite opaque.

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With the aim of illuminating causality between reform process and economic performance of the Central Asian states under systemic transformation towards a market economy, I classify them into two categories from the viewpoint of the institutional allocations, which characterize relations between government and business firms. Theoretical discussions and some empirical evidences strongly suggest that the differences in government-business relationship of each country have deeply interrelated with robustness of industrial production against so-called 'transformational recession' and incentive levels of the former socialist enterprises for their restructuring during the initial phase of transitional period. It seems to me that these findings may be suggestive also for other FSU countries.

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The purpose of this paper is to make clear the current situation and the perspective of transportation and telecommunications in the Russian Far East. Section 1 reviews the situation of transportation in this region after the collapse of the USSR, and points out the possibilities of developing the International Transportation Corridor across the Russian Far East. Section 2 surveys the economic performance of the regions telecommunication sector, and points out positive and negative factors concerning its further development. Section 3 briefly reviews the policy priorities of the Russian Federal Government on transportation and telecommunication, in particular, it focuses on the development of infrastructure and the anti-monopoly reform in these sectors.

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Dr. Zausaev's paper includes a very unique conception. As a common concept we have a vision that the Russian Far East is a vast land rich with natural resources. However, according to the authorl, (1) the Russian Far East does not have a large amount of land suitable for living, (2) economic payable resources are not many, (3) costs for living in this area and development of these resources in this area are very high and (4) therefore its enterprises are not competitive internationally. The main issue of this paper is "why Japanese-Russian economic relations falls behind USA, China and Korea in the risky Russian market?" His answer is as follows.
(1) In comparison with USA, the American government is much more eager to support enterprises launching into Russia, businessmen have a much more active entrepreneurship and invest money in oil and gas development projects. (2) Compared with China, there are more clear mutual benefits in the trade of labors, weapons and resources. (3) Compared with Korea, its exported goods to Russia have comparative advantages in price compared to Japanese one's and their quality is as bad as China's, at the same time the main capital extending to RFE are larger than the Japanese ones.

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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the history of the natural gas wholesale market in Ukraine from the point of view of the "Gastraders". We define the Gastrader as a company which imports and sells to industries. Gastraders are said to be one of the most profitable businesses in Ukraine because of its market scale and non-monetary transaction. Generally speaking, there are three periods in the history of the gas market.
The first period is the period of state monopoly (up to 1995), the second is the period of the regionally divided system (1996-97), and the third one is the period of NaftoHaz (Ukraine's state gas monopoly) and ITERA (Gazprom's favorite).
Throughout. these periods, external pressure (IMF and Gazprom) as well as the internal political situation took effect on the policy making of the gas market.

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