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To what extent can a country’s effectiveness in reducing child poverty be attributed to the size of family cash transfers (that is, both benefits and tax advantages) or to their design? In this paper, we disentangle the importance of each of these two factors, focusing on the family support system in Lithuania and comparing it with four other new member states. Both single parent and large families are increasingly susceptible to poverty in Lithuania. This contrasts with other former communist countries, namely Estonia, Hungary, Slovenia and the Czech Republic, which protect these family types much better. This paper examines whether their family transfer systems would achieve similar results in Lithuania. We employ the EUROMOD microsimulation tax-benefit model to swap family policies across countries and test whether size or design has greater effects on child poverty reduction in Lithuania. Hungarian, Slovenian and Czech policies would considerably improve the poverty situation among large families. Single parent families would only gain if Lithuanian spending on family transfers increased radically. Estonian policies would lead to mixed results: small gains for large families and losses for single parent families. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do countries move from public to private financing of healthcare? This paper explores this issue by looking at the divergent reform trajectories of three postcommunist countries — the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. While existing accounts emphasize veto points to explain changes in healthcare systems, the present analysis finds that moves towards private financing can be better explained by differences in access to the policymaking arm of the state. Specifically, a penetrable single-party government and weak bureaucratic capacities allow physicians to capture the reform process and implement their preferred policies. The results suggest that scholars of health policy should focus more attention on the actors seeking change and their access to policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how interactions between government agencies and banking organizations led to the emergence of commercial banking in the Czech Republic and Hungary during the 1990s. We rely on interviews with bank managers at six large banks, government officers, and experts at other organizations to learn how actions based on different political ideologies shaped the banking field. We integrate prior research on institutional change, political interest, and transition economies to describe the emergence of commercial banking. Three important problems characterized commercial banking in the two countries: the disposal of bad loans, the privatization of banks, and the establishment of banking services. We argue that the solutions to these problems based on the changing political interests of organizational actors and regulators represent the phases of institutional development in commercial banking during the 1990s. Implications of our research are discussed regarding the political perspective of organizational fields in transition economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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