This fall marks the 20th anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The transition process that followed drastically changed society with far reaching consequences for its populations. How to understand and navigate this process, involving reforms as well as the creation of economic and political institutions, was much debated at the time and has subsequently lead to a whole field of research in “transition economics”. Even though the use of this term has become less fashionable, the underlying issues of understanding large economic and political transformations of society are still highly relevant. Remaining challenges in this region as well as recent events in the Middle East and North Africa are clear illustrations of this.

It is against this background that we launch the FREE Policy Brief Series. The Forum for Research on Eastern Europe and Emerging Economies (FREE) is a joint initiative by SITE (Stockholm), BEROC (Minsk), BICEPS (Riga), CEFIR (Moscow), CenEA (Szczecin), ISET (Tblisi) and KEI (Kiev).

Since the late 1980s, SITE has been a leading research institute on transition economics. As part of its mission SITE has also contributed to building a network of economic research institutes in the region. Today, we together form a group of leading academic experts doing research and policy work on topics that are relevant for a broad set of countries.

The FREE Policy Brief Series is designed to provide short and informative analyses on current economic policy challenges. The writings will be based on academic research papers or policy work by the researchers at the different institutes and updated on a weekly basis. The ambition is to bridge the gap between ongoing academic research and policy making, to stimulate and contribute to the international debate as well as to intensify the interaction and discussion with other researchers, policy-makers, and business representatives across the world. We hope you will find our writings interesting and useful.

A new policy brief will appear on FREEpolicybriefs.org every Monday.