Press Releases 1998

[Index]

FIRST HALF OF 1998: DYNAMIC ECONOMIC GROWTH IN THE UN/ECE REGION RISING RISKS IN TRANSITION ECONOMIES

3 July 1998

UN/ECE issues its second 1998 Economic Survey of Europe

The United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN/ECE) publishes its second 1998 Economic Survey of Europe. This Survey analyses the economic developments of the 55 countries of the region in the first half of 1998.

Part One contains an overview of the economic situation and outlook in the ECE region at mid-year and updates the more extensive analysis provided earlier in the year in the first issue of the 1998 volume (see excerpt attached). The review of the economic situation in Part One of this issue is based on data and information available to the secretariat at the beginning of June 1998.

Part Two contains a selection of papers presented to the UN/ECE's Spring Seminar in April 1998 which was devoted to the problems of enterprise and bank restructuring in the transition economies. They highlight the continuing fragility of the enterprise and financial sectors in many of the transition economies, a fragility which renders them especially vulnerable to external financial shocks emanating from other parts of the world economy.

Part Three consists of a statistical appendix, which appears in all issues of the Survey, of long-run series for the principal macroeconomic variables in the ECE member countries; the tables incorporate the revisions made by national statistical offices and available to the secretariat in June 1998.

The 1998 volume of the Survey is the fifty-first in a series of reports prepared by the secretariat of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe. Until now the Economic Survey of Europe has been an annual publication as was the Economic Bulletin for Europe, the secretariat's second publication which focused on trade and payments issues. At its fifty-second session, in April 1997, the Commission decided to replace these two publications with an annual Survey of three issues starting in 1998. The present issue is the second issue of the 1998 volume. The first issue appeared in May and the third is scheduled for late November.

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