From introduction:

During the early nineties, central, east and southeast European countries set on liberalizing their economies on an unprecedented scale, including more or less speedy or profound external liberalizations in country-specific approaches. Since then, we have observed increasingly differentiated changes in these countries’ legal institutional bases. Based on a small but growing literature, we may conjecture that both observations do not only describe a chronological sequence but a causal relationship. This note discusses this conjecture and argues that the globalization of production processes acts as a channel in this causal relationship. Whether or not trade liberalization helps in improving countries’ domestic legal institutions depends on the nature of openness emanating from liberalization: some countries firms’ joined fragmented, globalized production processes, for others, the dependence on primary products even increased.