First Published in 1999. Small Businesses Trickling Up in Central and Eastern Europe argues that micro-, small, and medium-sized enterprises in selected countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have been the key to economic growth rather than privatized large-scale enterprises. Small businesses have come to constitute the most dynamic element of growth in the emerging markets of the CEE region in the last decade. In 1989, most of the countries of the region were still under the political and economic domination of the Soviet Union. Since then a process of liberalization has been unleashed in the region to dismantle statist economic policies and replace them with free market policies. This has involved programs of privatization and restructuring of state-owned enterprises, as well as the promotion of policies to enable a private sector to develop. Small businesses are creating thousands of new jobs while large companies are retrenching and downsizing their workforce. In some countries of the region this process is much further along than in others. In each country, however, the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector has developed at a more rapid pace than has the privatization of the large public companies. The privatization of small and medium-sized state-owned enterprises has been rather more successful. With the economic transition there has been a flurry of new enterprises springing up throughout the region, some registered as legal entities but many micro-enterprises often remaining unregistered in the informal sector. Micro-enterprises are increasingly seen as an important element of this SME sector, although they were traditionally treated separately as belonging to the informal sector and a detriment to economic growth.

A poignant reflection on alienation and belonging, told through the lives of five remarkable people who struggled against nationalism and intolerance in one of EuropeÕs most stunning cities. What does it mean to belong somewhere? For many of PragueÕs inhabitants, belonging has been linked to the nation, embodied in the capital city. Grandiose medieval buildings and monuments to national heroes boast of a glorious, shared history. Past governments, democratic and Communist, layered the city with architecture that melded politics and nationhood. Not all inhabitants, however, felt included in these efforts to nurture national belonging. Socialists, dissidents, Jews, Germans, and VietnameseÑall have been subject to hatred and political persecution in the city they called home. Chad Bryant tells the stories of five marginalized individuals who, over the last two centuries, forged their own notions of belonging in one of EuropeÕs great cities. An aspiring guidebook writer, a German-speaking newspaperman, a Bolshevik carpenter, an actress of mixed heritage who came of age during the Communist terror, and a Czech-speaking Vietnamese blogger: none of them is famous, but their lives are revealing. They speak to tensions between exclusionary nationalism and on-the-ground diversity. In their struggles against alienation and dislocation, they forged alternative communities in cafes, workplaces, and online. While strolling park paths, joining political marches, or writing about their lives, these outsiders came to embody a city that, on its surface, was built for others. A powerful and creative meditation on place and nation, the individual and community, Prague envisions how cohesion and difference might coexist as it acknowledges a need common to all.

This 2013 Article IV Consultation highlights that the Czech economy, despite its strong fundamentals, is in the midst of a prolonged recession because of the euro area slump and weak domestic demand. A further slowdown in the euro area would exacerbate the situation, creating the risk of lower growth in the long run. Short-term macroeconomic policies should therefore be geared toward supporting the economy and not creating additional drag. Boosting potential growth in the medium to long term will require implementation of additional structural reforms. Given the large fiscal consolidation achieved so far, further consolidation efforts should be avoided until the economic recovery gains strength.

This history of a single town in Bohemia casts new light on nationalism in Central Europe between the Springtime of Nations in 1848 and the Cold War. Jeremy King tells the story of both German and Czech-speaking Budweis/Budæjovice, which belonged to the Habsburg Monarchy until 1918, and then to Czechoslovakia, Hitler's Third Reich, and Czechoslovakia again. Residents, at first simply "Budweisers," or Habsburg subjects with mostly local loyalties, gradually became Czechs or Germans. Who became Czech, though, and who German? What did it mean to be one or the other? In answering these questions, King shows how an epochal, region-wide contest for power found expression in Budweis/Budæjovice not only through elections but through clubs, schools, boycotts, breweries, a remarkable constitutional experiment, a couple of riots, and much more. In tracing the nationalization of politics from small and sometimes comic beginnings to the genocide and mass expulsions of the 1940s, he also rejects traditional interpretive frameworks. Writing not a national history but a history of nationhood, both Czech and German, King recovers a nonnational dimension to the past. Embodied locally by Budweisers and more generally by the Habsburg state, that dimension has long been blocked from view by a national rhetoric of race and ethnicity. King's Czech-Habsburg-German narrative, in addition to capturing the dynamism and complexity of Bohemian politics, participates in broader scholarly discussions concerning the nature of nationalism.

The first Earth Day in 1970 marked environmentalism’s coming-of-age in the United States. More than four decades later, does the green movement remain a transformative force in American life? Presenting a new account from a legal perspective, Environment in the Balance interprets a wide range of U.S. Supreme Court decisions, along with social science research and the literature of the movement, to gauge the practical and cultural impact of environmentalism and its future prospects. Jonathan Z. Cannon demonstrates that from the 1960s onward, the Court’s rulings on such legal issues as federalism, landowners’ rights, standing, and the scope of regulatory authority have reflected deep-seated cultural differences brought out by the mass movement to protect the environment. In the early years, environmentalists won some important victories, such as the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision allowing them to sue against barriers to recycling. But over time the Court has become more skeptical of their claims and more solicitous of values embodied in private property rights, technological mastery and economic growth, and limited government. Today, facing the looming threat of global warming, environmentalists struggle to break through a cultural stalemate that threatens their goals. Cannon describes the current ferment in the movement, and chronicles efforts to broaden its cultural appeal while staying connected to its historical roots, and to ideas of nature that have been the source of its distinctive energy and purpose.

This paper presents a financial system stability assessment update for the Czech Republic. The financial system is confronted with a number of growing risks. Owing to a high reliance of the Czech economy on exports to European Union (EU) countries, the main risk stems from negative developments in EU countries. The results of stress tests show that Czech banks can withstand substantial shocks. The paper reports that the regulatory and supervisory framework for financial institutions is generally sound, although inadequate resources are a major weakness.