Incollection,
Singular Localized Education Centres Drive East European Countries to Free Market Economy.
Abstract Book of the XXIII IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Physics, Genova, Italy, (9-13 July 2007)
Abstract
The liberalization of Eastern European economies initiated a puzzling process which exposed dramatic divergences between various outcomes but also ubiquitous regularities (e.g. the 'J-curve' effect : initial decline in the economy followed by an upturn, (see figure)). The transition dynamics was often studied in terms of data and models aggregated over the entire nation. In this work we connect the transition dynamics to the emergence of highly localized autocatalytic growth centers. The singular character of those centers requires a modification of the usual logistic differential equations. Instead, we use a discrete theoretical framework capable to take fully into account the high inhomogeneity of the dynamics. The resulting model is tractable analytically and its predictions fit in a spectacular manner the unusually rich data set we have on the 2945 counties of Poland for the 15 years following the liberalization. It turns out that one very important charactaristic of these centres is high average education level as was measured in 1988 during the previous regime.
