The Centre recently held two workshops in Brussels as part of a major project on Eastern Europe, which has received financial support from the Commission of the European Communities under its PHARE programme. The first, on `Taxation and Tax Reform in Central and Eastern Europe', held on 3 May, was organized by David Newbery, Director of the Department of Applied Economics, Cambridge, and Research Fellow in CEPR's International Trade and Industrial Organization programmes, and Richard Portes, Director of CEPR and Professor of Economics at Birkbeck College, London. The following topics were discussed:

`Economic Transition, Distribution and the Tax-Benefit System in Hungary', Sarah Jarvis (Department of Applied Economics, Cambridge) and Stephen Pudney (University of Leicester)

`Subsidies to Enterprises in Transition Economies', Mark Schaffer (LSE)

`Incentives, Taxes and Subsidies in the Labor Market: A Closer Look at the Czech and Slovak Republics', Michael Burda (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin and CEPR)

`Unemployment Insurance, Taxation and Incentives in Hungary', John Micklewright (European University Institute, Firenze) and Gyula Nagy (Budapest University of Economics)

`The Taxation of Entrepreneurial Income in a Transition Economy: Issues Raised by Experience in Poland', Stephen Smith (University College London) and Maciej Grabowski (Gdansk Institute for Market Economics)

`Tax and Benefit Reform in the Czech and Slovak Republics', Stephen Smith (University College London) and Christopher Heady (University of Bath)

The second, `Now What? The Next Stage of Economic Transformation in Central Europe', on 16 May, was organized by Peter Bofinger, Professor of Economics at the Universität Würzburg and Research Fellow in CEPR's International Macroeconomics programme and Richard Portes. The following topics were discussed:

`Monetary and Fiscal Policy', William Branson (Princeton University and CEPR) and Jorge Braga de Macedo (Universidade Nova de Lisboa and CEPR)

`The Role of the Exchange Rate in the Process of Economic Transformation', László Halpern (Hungarian Academy of Sciences) and Charles Wyplosz (INSEAD and CEPR)

`Trade Performance and Trade Policy', Zdenek Drábek (Czech National Bank) and Alasdair Smith (University of Sussex and CEPR)

`Enterprise Restructuring', Irena Grosfeld (Département et Laboratoire d'Economie Théorique et Appliquée, Paris) and Gérard Roland (European Centre for Advanced Research in Economics, Université Libre de Bruxelles, and CEPR)

`Economic Transformation of Labor Markets and in Central and Eastern Europe', Wolfgang Franz (Universität Konstanz and CEPR)