This article is based on a panel discussion on the future of transition countries 25 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. All the contributors have long professional and personal experience of various aspects of the transition process so far and provide different perspectives on what to expect for the region in the future.

The quality of institutions is a major factor in the success or failure of nations and a fundamental source of differences in per capita income between countries. This work is devoted to the analysis of the definition of institutions and studies their impact on the economic development of developed and developing countries. The state of institutional development in Belarus for 1996-2015 is assessed, and the directions of further development of institutions based on the experience of other countries are considered.

In this paper, we study the impact of different types of crises such as sovereign and domestic defaults, banking crises, economic recessions on political turnover of the top politicians: heads of the state and central bank governors.