This book is simply awful. One wonders at the standards of academic publishing that this material ever got into print. The poor man barely writes English, for starters, and watching paint dry would be more interesting than wading through his prose.

Readers looking for insights into the post-communist situation will be disappointed by this lackluster, sterile treatment.

It never ceases to amaze me how academics like Marer will dare to take a pile of dead statistics and edit them into texts which libraries feel obliged to snatch up, due to their well-considered titles. This is yet another opus in this tradition. Marer and his co-author tell us absolutely nothing new about management -- it seems that Marer is an economist and never managed anything in his life, in Europe or elsewhere -- and very little about the region the duo are allegedly producing a spendy book about. This book is a total waste of the serious scholar's or casual book-buyer's money. If you want to learn something about management in Eastern and Central Europe, track down the web sites of the English-language newspapers and business periodicals for Budapest, Bucharest, Warsaw, or wherever else you need to learn how to do business. Don't waste your time with this drab and intellectually hollow compilation of stale ideas and data.