Since the beginning of the 1990’s several models of privatization have been applied in Serbia. While much was written concerning the models themselves at the time of their application, remarkably little has been written in regards to the assessment of their implementation over the last decade. The paper investigates the scope, types, and results, with an emphasis on this time period. Given that the official failure rate of privatizations undertaken is around one in four, the paper focuses on the weaknesses of the legal and economic aspects of the model, the weaknesses of the privatization implementation, and the weaknesses in the monitoring of the privatization process. Another focus is on the inadequate attention paid to the need for institutional coherence, which led to results that were not in accord with the goals set out. The paper will also point out the areas of further research that, in the opinion of the authors, should be undertaken in order to come to an assessment of privatization as the central and most important aspect of the transition

Previous empirical researches have mostly confirmed the existence of positive impact of transport infrastructure investments on economic growth of national economies. There are a very few researches carried out at the lower levels of territorial units, mostly at the levels of NUTS-1 or NUTS-2 statistical regions. The aim of this paper is to analyse economic effects of transport infrastructure development at even lower level of territorial units, i.e. at the level of NUTS-3 statistical regions. The paper compares economic performances of the TENT European regions characterized by developed core trans-European road and rail transport network, with economic performances of other regions without the core network. A significant difference in favour of the TENT regions was identified, both in the case of gross value added of the entire economy and gross value added of the manufacturing industry. No significant differences were identified in terms of the employment rate. On the other hand, the labour productivity is higher in the TENT regions, primarily in the manufacturing industry, as a direct consequence of reducing transport time and transport costs.

Serbia has had a long history of privatization. It commenced in 1990 and was only fully completed, as defined by the privatization legislation, in 2015. The reasons for this are many and complex and the paper provides a short historical overview. Privatization, however, began in earnest after the democratic revolution of 2000 and the paper analyses the political motives behind the adoption of the current model. The paper goes on to explain the model design, as well as its dynamics and results. The analysis probes more deeply into the specific weaknesses of auction implementation, showing that an alternative approach could have produced better results in terms of revenue. The specific institutional flaws that led to a high failure rate in the privatization of companies are identified and analysed. These weaknesses lie in the design, implementation, and monitoring, which led to results that were not in line with the goals of the privatization process. The designers of the privatization model gave scant attention to broader institutional coherence, which enabled largescale manipulation of the process. In some cases this enabled motives unrelated to the future of the firm being privatized to dominate the process. Finally, the scope of the last round of privatization in Serbia, which commenced in June 2015, and the probable results are discussed.

The subject of this paper is the analysis of the classification of economic systems. The traditional classifications of capitalist, socialist centrally planned, and socialist market systems, and the newer classification of variants of capitalism into the Anglo-Saxon, European continental, and Asian models, are inadequate to explain new phenomena in a globalized economy. After the collapse of central planning, countries in transition became a category describing processes of deep socio-economic transformation. These transition countries aspired to meet the standards of developed European market economies, as well as governance standards regarding democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. A new classification of economic systems by Balcerowicz (2014) combines the traditional classification of economic systems with the characteristics of well-governed democratic societies in order to come up with a matrix that shows the interaction of economic system characteristics and governance outcomes.This paper builds on Balcerowicz’s classification by introducing and delineating the categories of state capitalism, crony capitalism, and state capture in order to provide a new classification of economic systems. It uses these concepts to empirically analyze the transition countries, with special reference to states aspiring to EU membership and the new EU member states. The methodology used is analytical and empirical. The results find that the transition is incomplete, especially in terms of governance, leading to the hypothesis of a ‘mid-transition trap’, similar to the much discussed ‘middle-income trap’. The results should lead to further, more refined research.

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