* The authors wish to thank Scott Adler, Steve Chan, Daniel Drezner, Stephen Hanson, and Peter Rutland for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this note.

1. M. Steven Fish, “The Determinants of Economic Reform in the Post-Communist World,”East European Politics and Societies 12 (Winter 1998): 31-78.

2. Joel Hellman also makes this point in, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Post-Communist Transitions,”World Politics, 50:2 (1998): 203-34.

3. Fish, “Determinants of Economic Reform,” 77.

4. See Fish, “Determinants of Economic Reform,” for a more detailed discussion of the measures included.

5. The fact that Fish's (and our subsequent) analyses address only 26 cases makes statistical inference not as conclusive as it might otherwise be. A cross-national time-series design would increase the number of cases and strengthen the validity of findings.

6. An F-test for subsets of X's was run and reveals that the distinction between Fish's model and our revised model is non-trivial. In other words, the change in Adjusted R²s reflects that our revised model offers important additional information regarding economic reforms.

7. Paul Krugman addresses this relationship between geography, interstate trade, and economic development in his book, Development, Geography, and Economic Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).

8. In order to calculate the distance from the westernmost border of Western Europe we measure based on proximity to Berlin or Vienna, whichever is closer.

Explaining the Why of the Why: a Comment on Fish's “Determinants of Economic Reform in the Post-communist World”

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