This book addresses the Soviet needs for external help to allow the Soviet leadership to carry out its program—in any version—of stabilization. It focuses on the scenarios outlined in the Shatalin plan, as elaborated in the 224-page draft made public.
IFC Discussion Paper No. 38.QUOTEIt is now universally acknowledged that ownership matters; that private ownership in and of itself is a major determinant of good performance in firms... Decent economic policy and well-functioning legal and administrative institutions... matter greatly as well.QUOTEThis paper looks at what happens when the shift to private ownership gets far out in front of the effort to build the institutional underpinnings of a capitalist economy. The emphasis is on what went wrong and why and what, if anything, can be done to be correct it. Proposals include renationalization and/or postponement of further privatization, both to be accompanied by measures to strengthen the managerial capacities of the state. Neither approach seems likely to produce short-term improvements. The regrettable fact is that governments that botch privatization are equally likely to botch the management of state-owned firms. In a number of Central European transition countries, privatization is living up to expectations; and there is no need for such measures. For institutionally-weak countries, the less dramatic but reasonable short-term course of action is to push ahead more slowly with case- by-case and tender privatization in cooperation with the international assistance community in hopes of producing some success stories that will lead by example.
World Bank Technical Paper No. 394. Joint Forest Management (JFM) has emerged as an important intervention in the management of Indias forest resources. This report sets out an analytical method for examining the costs and benefits of JFM arrangements. Two pilot case studies in which the method was used demonstrate interesting outcomes regarding incentives for various groups to participate. The main objective of this study is to develop a better understanding of the incentives for communities to participate in JFM.
In 1991, a small group of Russians emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union and enjoyed one of the greatest transfers of wealth ever seen, claiming ownership of some of the most valuable petroleum, natural gas and metal deposits in the world. By 1997, five of those individuals were on Forbes Magazine's list of the world's richest billionaires.
The countries of Eastern Europe have been on the long road to the market for more than a decade. And while the macroeconomic record has been well documented, there has been little analysis of individual country and cross-sector progress. This book offers detailed comparative analysis of the housing sector in seven countries as a window to understanding the developments beyond the headlines. The authors document housing progress towards reliance on markets, how easy it is for families to buy housing, and how the housing sector has contributed to macroeconomic stabilization in Hungary, Slovenia, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Poland, Russia, Armenia, and Estonia.
This book pinpoints continuities and changes in U.S. foreign economic policy from the fixed exchange rate system of the 1960s through to the period between the two oil crises of the 1970s. Chapters pay close attention to the interconnectedness between the long lasting decline of the U.S. Dollar on foreign exchange markets and the U.S. balance of payments, transformations in international capital markets, and international oil developments. The book charts the prolonged failure of Washington’s foreign economic policies to restore U.S. financial and monetary leadership through to the Carter Administration.
The transformation of the Soviet economy is bound to be extraordinarily complex and will take many years to complete. Three closely related areas require action at the outset of the process: macroeconomic stabilization, including fiscal, monetary, trade and payments, and incomes policies; price reform in an environment of increased domestic and external competition; and ownership reform, involving the rapid privatization of retail trade and small enterprises, along with the commercialization of large, state-owned enterprises. Many measures are needed to support policy actions in these three areas. A social safety net will be needed to protect the most vulnerable from the short-term adverse consequences of the reform process. Other measures include completion of the legal framework for a market economy, the creation of a market system for banking and finance, the demonopolization and restructuring of many enterprises, the reconstruction of the transport and communications infrastructure, the development of a system of labor relations, the process of privatization of state enterprises and collective farms, and the addressing of serious environmental problems. These and other issues, and the close relationships between them, are discussed in this study.
Leading scholars in the field analyse the Soviet economy sector by sector to make available, in textbook form, the results of the latest research on Soviet industrialisation.
Economic research monograph on banking and monetary policy in the USSR - covers foreign exchange, trade and the balance of payments, price stabilization policies, the nature of capital flows, foreign investments, financial planning, the credit system, etc. Bibliography pp. 204 to 218, diagram and references.