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In 1994, the Asia Foundation's Center for Asian Pacific Affairs began a two-year project to compare the transitions of selected East European and Asian economies from centrally-planned communist systems to market economies. The goal was to shed light on the transition process through an understanding of the underlying economic and institutional dynamics. This volume is the culmination of that project.The volume is divided into three parts. In the first part, an overview, the editors review the authors' findings and highlight major themes. The second part looks closely at the transition process in seven Asian and East European economies: China, Vietnam, Mongolia, Russia, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic. The third part contains six comparative studies that explore key elements of the transition process. The papers incorporate feedback obtained from meetings with cabinet members and high government officials, conferences, and seminars in Prague, Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Beijing, Ulan Bator, and Washington, D.C. Contributors Leszek Balcerowicz, Barbara Blaszczyk, Peter Boone, Yuan Zheng Cao, Bruce Comer, Marek Dabrowski, Georges de Menil, Daniel C. Esty, Gang Fan, Boris Federov, Roman Frydman, Carol Graham, Stephen Parker, Andrzej Rapaczynski, James Riedel, Jeffrey D. Sachs, Baavaa Tarvaa, Vinod Thomas, Gavin Tritt, Adiya Tsend, Enkhbold Tsendjav, Joel Turkewitz, Narantsetseg Unenburen, Yan Wang, Wing Thye Woo
One of Europe's old nations steeped in history, Ukraine is today an undisputed independent state. It is a democracy and has transformed into a market economy with predominant private ownership. Ukraine's postcommunist transition has been one of the most protracted and socially costly, but it has taken the country to a desirable destination. Åslund's vivid account of Ukraine's journey begins with a brief background, where he discusses the implications of Ukraine's history, the awakening of society because of Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms, the early democratization, and the impact of the ill-fated Soviet economic reforms. He then turns to the reign of President Leonid Kravchuk from 1991 to 1994, the only salient achievement of which was nation-building, while the economy collapsed in the midst of hyperinflation. The first two years of Leonid Kuchma's presidency, from 1994 to 1996, were characterized by substantial achievements, notably financial stabilization and mass privatization. The period 1996–99 was a miserable period of policy stagnation, rent seeking, and continued economic decline. In 2000 hope returned to Ukraine. Viktor Yushchenko became prime minister and launched vigorous reforms to cleanse the economy from corruption, and economic growth returned. The ensuing period, 2001–04, amounted to a competitive oligarchy. It was quite pluralist, although repression increased. Economic growth was high. The year 2004 witnessed the most joyful period in Ukraine, the Orange Revolution, which represented Ukraine's democratic breakthrough, with Yushchenko as its hero. The postrevolution period, however, has been characterized by great domestic political instability; a renewed, explicit Russian threat to Ukraine's sovereignty; and a severe financial crisis. The answers to these challenges lie in how soon the European Union fully recognizes Ukraine's long-expressed identity as a European state, how swiftly Ukraine improves its malfunctioning constitutional order, and how promptly it addresses corruption.
In Poland's jump to the Market Economy, Jeffrey Sachs provides an insider's analysis of the political events and economic strategy behind the country's swift transition to capitalism and democracy. The greatest challenges to economic reform, Sachs points out, have been primarily political in nature, rather than social or even economic.Sachs reviews Poland's striking progress since the start of the economic reforms three years ago, which he helped to design. He discusses the gains - more than half of employment and GDP is now in the private sector, exports to Western Europe have more than doubled, and economic growth and confidence are returning - as well as the serious problems that remain - high unemployment, a chronic fiscal deficit, the slow pace of privatization of large industrial enterprises, and the fragility of multiparty coalition governments.Sachs points out that leadership is crucial to economic reform in a newly democratic setting, as is the West's timely economic assistance. In Poland's case, the Zloty Stabilization Fund and the two-stage debt cancellation have been essential to keeping the reform program on track.Poland's example has had a powerful impact on reforms throughout the region, including the former Soviet Union, and has done much to dispel the fear that the citizens themselves, allegedly made lazy by decades of socialism, would reject the competitive rigors of a market economy. Overall, Sachs remains firmly convinced of the potential for successful economic reforms. in Poland and the rest of the region.Jeffrey Sachs is Galen L. Stone Professor of International Trade at Harvard University, and has been an economic advisor to more than a dozen countries around the world, including Bolivia, Mongolia, Poland, and Russia.
For many years Myanmar operated an inward-looking economic system built on import substitution. Ultimately this policy failed, leaving behind inefficient state economic enterprises and widespread poverty. Political unrest in 1988 led a newly installed military government to liberalize the economy, opening it to foreign investment and private participation in trade. This move towards a market economy was in line with world-wide trends, but political instability forced the country to follow a course different from neighboring countries. By analyzing economic policies and performance across the economic spectrum, this book presents an overall picture of economic development in Myanmar between 1988 and the early 2000s. The authors synthesize both macro and micro level data to overcome some of the limitations of unreliable national statistics, and show how the government attempted to deal with two key issues it faced. The first was how to reform the inefficient socialistic economic system in conformity with a market economy, and the second was how to develop the agricultural and underdeveloped economy to alleviate mass poverty.
Privatization policies are the centrepiece of the historically unique transformation of the centrally planned, into market economies. Yet the peculiarities of the privatization process in Eastern Europe are little understood in the West because of differences in historical, socio-political and economic contexts relative to Western experience. Most research on privatization in the West is rather theoretical and thus pays insufficient attention to these contexts, perhaps because their importance is not widely appreciated and because there has been little information about them available. Moreover, the significant differences among East European countries in contexts and in policies are not well-understood even within the region, again because of a lack of information.
This clear and accessible text explores Vietnam's successful transition from neo-Stalinist central planning to a market economy—\"Vietnamese style.\" After describing the north Vietnamese system prior to 1975 and its colonial and precolonial antecedents, the authors uncover the mechanisms of that changeover. They contend that the Vietnamese transition was largely bottom-up in character and that it evolved over a long enough period for the country's political economy to adjust. This explains in part the rapid shift to a high-growth, externally oriented development path in the early 1990s, despite the loss of Soviet aid and the lack of significant Western substitutes until 1992-1993. Based upon extensive incountry experience, a wealth of primary materials, and wide comparative knowledge of development issues, the book challenges many preconceived notions, both about Vietnam and about the general nature of transition processes.
The transition to a market economy proves to be far more difficult in Russia than in the former centrally planned economies of eastern Europe. The Russian economy continues to face serious problems, including substantial inflationary pressures, falling output, and capital flight. The most positive aspect of the transition has been the relatively fast pace of privatization. Challenges for Russian Economic Reform contains papers published by the post-Soviet Business Forum at the Royal Institute of International Affairs that have been revised for this volume. The contributers, specalists in Russian economic affairs, examine the principal economic and institutional factors that have hindered transformation in Russia. The sheer size of the country has complicated the problem of exposing domestic producers to foreign competition and has weakened the ability of central authorities to control the regions. Economic stabilization has been hampered by the difficulties in establishing sound economic relations with the former Soviet republics. David Dyker and Michael Barrow analyze the problems of monopoly and competition policy in Russia. Philip Hanson assesses the obstacles to economic stabilization posed by regional economic interests and examines regional diversity in reform implementation. Michael Kaser examines the problems of privatization by regions and sectors in Russia and the CIS and the institutional obstacles encountered by foreign investors. Alan Smith explores the problems created by the breakup of traditional trade and payment relations with the non-Russian republics of the former Soviet Union and bilateral trade links with Eastern Europe. He also provides an overall assessment of Russian economic performance since the collapse of communism.
A noted Chinese economist examines the mechanisms behind China's economic reforms, arguing that universal principles and specific implementations are equally important. As China has transformed itself from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, economists have tried to understand and interpret the success of Chinese reform. As the Chinese economist Yingyi Qian explains, there are two schools of thought on Chinese reform: the “School of Universal Principles,” which ascribes China's successful reform to the workings of the free market, and the “School of Chinese Characteristics,” which holds that China's reform is successful precisely because it did not follow the economics of the market but instead relied on the government. In this book, Qian offers a third perspective, taking certain elements from each school of thought but emphasizing not why reform worked but how it did. Economics is a science, but economic reform is applied science and engineering. To a practitioner, it is more useful to find a feasible reform path than the theoretically best way. The key to understanding how reform has worked in China, Qian argues, is to consider the way reform designs respond to initial historical conditions and contemporary constraints. Qian examines the role of “transitional institutions”—not “best practice institutions” but “incentive-compatible institutions”—in Chinese reform; the dual-track approach to market liberalization; the ownership of firms, viewed both theoretically and empirically; government decentralization, offering and testing hypotheses about its link to local economic development; and the specific historical conditions of China's regional-based central planning.
The transition from socialist or communist economy to market economy in many countries has been dramatic, unpredictable, and mostly on the surface, observable in new consumption patterns or higher standards of living. But deeper change in the managerial mindset in these new market economies has been much slower and less evident. It is crucial to business success for foreign managers to understand their transition economy counterparts. This book examines the interactions that foreign and transition economy managers have in building business relationships, the influences behind those interactions, how the interactions themselves change over time, and how to manage the process of building relationships more smoothly.
Can knowledge of financial policies in developing countries over four decades help the socialist economies of Asia and Eastern Europe become open market economies in the 1990s? In all these countries the loss of fiscal and monetary control has often resulted in high inflation that undermines the liberalization process itself. In the second edition of The Order of Economic Liberalization, Ronald McKinnon builds on his influential work on the liberalization of financial markets in less developed countries and outlines the progression necessary to move from a "repressed" to an open economy. New to this edition are chapters that contrast the gradual Chinese approach to liberalizing domestic and foreign trade with the "big bang" approach followed by some Eastern European countries and republics of the former Soviet Union. Financial control and macroeconomic stability, McKinnon argues, are more critical to a successful transition than is any crash program to privatize state-owned industrial assets and the banking system.