This volume gathers together essays on the theme of economic transition in Central and Eastern Europe, written by the former Polish Minister of Finance. In it, the author summarizes the research on institutions, institutional change and human behaviour that he has undertaken since the late 1970s. He addresses such issues as the socialist market economy, reformability of the Soviet-type economic system, democratization and market-orientated reform in Central and Eastern Europe, and the Polish model of economic reform.
This book analyzes the reform of the socialist system in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Uniquely, it adopts a multi-disciplinary perspective which includes authors from both Western Europe and the former Communist world. The volume contains analyses of: the prospects for civil society, economic reform and privatisation, theories of economic transition and the role of the state, political change and the persistence of former Communist parties, the prospects for democracy in the former Soviet Union, and gender aspects of labour market reform.
This book takes stock of the diverse and divergent welfare trajectories of postsocialist countries across central and eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Authors from different disciplines address key aspects of social protection including health care, poverty reduction measures, labor market policies, pension systems, and child welfare.
This book focuses on the spatial transformations in the most dynamically evolving urban areas of post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe. It links the restructuring of the built environment with the underlying processes and the forces of socio-economic reforms. The detailed accounts of the spatial transformations in a key moment of urban history in the region enhance our understanding of the linkages between society and space.
This book provides a comprehensive account of the structure, conduct, and performance of the centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe, the USSR, Communist China and the Marxist LDCs, looking at 26 nations in all. The author focuses on reform, perhaps the most important issue facing countries such as the USSR, Poland, Hungary, and China. Bureaucracy, soft budget constraints, markets, and the nature of the socialist state are the central issues that arise in the course of reforming a socialist economy. The first half of the book deals with 'classical socialism' and provides a theoretical summary of the main features of a now closed period of history. The second half deals with the processes of reform and concludes that the reform of classical socialist systems is doomed to failure as they are unable to renew themselves internally.
The book explores both theoretically and empirically the impacts of housing reforms on housing provision in the context of the transition from a centrally-planned to a market-based economy. Fifteen years after the overthrow of state socialism housing policy has lost its privileged status of a political priority as most politically emb- ded systems had favoured market-based solutions to housing problems. This dep- ture from state controlled housing policies with the aim of providing a dwelling for every family is significant, particularly in some post-socialist countries where no new housing policy has emerged. The transition process, embedded in the paradigm shift from central planning to markets, has triggered off turbulence and adjustments with tangible outcomes in post-socialist housing systems. What has changed and what new housing systems have emerged during this dramatic ‘transition to markets and democracy’? Are these systems more efficient and equitable? These questions are the main focus of the book with an emphasis on diversity and change in housing reforms. The book supports the hypothesis that notions of convergence are not really appropriate to the conceptualisation of post-socialist housing systems. It argues that different housing policy choices are going to map out increasingly divergent s- nario for future development.
Labor regimes under communism in East-Central Europe were complex, shifting, and ambiguous. This collection of sixteen essays offers new conceptual and empirical ways to understand their history from the end of World War II to 1989, and to think about how their experiences relate to debates about labor history, both European and global. The authors reconsider the history of state socialism by re-examining the policies and problems of communist regimes and recovering the voices of the workers who built them. The contributors look at work and workers in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia. They explore the often contentious relationship between politics and labor policy, dealing with diverse topics including workers’ safety and risks; labor rights and protests; working women’s politics and professions; migrant workers and social welfare; attempts to control workers’ behavior and stem unemployment; and cases of incomplete, compromised, or even abandoned processes of proletarianization. Workers are presented as active agents in resisting and supporting changes in labor policies, in choosing allegiances, and in defining the very nature of work.
To what extent can contemporary socialist economies be reformed by the introduction of markets? The question is usually debated in either a Chinese or an East European context; this collection of eleven essays is unique in taking the first steps toward a comparative analysis. Twenty years of experience with reforms in Hungary and a decade of experimentation with reforms in China proivde a critical mass of evidence for analyzing the problems endemic to cnetrally planned economies and the dilemmas faced in efforts to reform them. In reflecting on the Chinese and East European experiences, these essays trace the shift from a conception of reform as a mix of planning and makrets within the state sector to a socialist mixed economy with implications for the emergence of new social groups and autonomous social organizations. The essays exemplify a new perspective in the study of state socialism that changes the focus from ideologies to economic institutions, examining how the activities of subordinate groups place limits on the power of state elites. The authors include scholars who have shaped debates in Eastern Europe and whose work is now stimulating much discussion in China, as well as representatives of a younger generation of economists, sociologists, and political scientists writing on the basis of field research recently conducted in factories, cities, and villages in China and Eastern Europe. The contributors are: Wlodzimierz Brus, Walter D. Connor, Zhiren Lin, Victor Nee, Susan Shirk, David Stark, Ivan Szelenyi, and Martin King Whyte. An introductory essays surveys recent theories and research on state socialism and outlines a new institutional perspective for understanding the dilemmas of partial reforms, the political cycles of reform and retrenchment, and the role of subordinate groups in stimulating changes outside the state sector.
