Transforming Post-Communist Political Economies (1998) / Chapter Skim
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Introduction
Introduction
Pages 1-10
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From page 1... ...
The task force's main charge was to improve understanding of the economic transformation in Central and Eastern Europe and the New Independent States, and to determine what we know about the interdependent economic, political, and social processes currently taking place in the region. The NRC also asked the task force to develop a research agenda that would direct efforts and funding to those areas, issues, and methods most likely to improve understanding of the complex and interrelated socioeconomic processes encompassed by the terms "transition" and "transformation." This volume responds to that charge.
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From page 2... ...
Similar difficulties beset our explanations of political change: models that fit more or less adequately the representative systems of capitalist democracies leave unstated both the underlying institutional forms and conditions for drastic transformation. At the outset of the transformation, these shortcomings of Western theory and knowledge were compounded by the widespread assumption that these societies would "naturally" evolve into systems closely approximating those of the industrialized West.
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From page 3... ...
While there are criteria for restructuring financial sectors consistent with the requirements of market economies, there is no single template from which one can draw the precise outlines of any of the components of an economic system (including central banks, monetary policies, investment incentives, monitoring systems, and savings institutions) that will foster both well-being and economic growth.
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From page 4... ...
To address the challenges posed by its mandate, the task force: · Commissioned a series of reports from specialists in East European and Eurasian social change and the processes of economic transformation, ranging from broad conceptual surveys to investigations of developments in specific sectors of particular countries.
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From page 5... ...
It should be understood at the outset that the term institution is used differently here than in common parlance or, for example, in the field of political science. The institutional approach defines institutions as the indispensable framework within which human interaction takes place as the "rules of the game," the humanly devised constraints, that determine incentives and shape human interactions in all societies (North, 1990:3-4~.
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From page 6... ...
These inquiries examine changing property rights, transaction costs, power structures, household coping strategies, and interpersonal networks. They call attention to the paths and sequences by which institutional transformation actually occurs, with an eye to the likely perverse effects of attempts to install replicas of specific Western organizational forms where the necessary institutional contexts have yet to emerge.
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From page 7... ...
Although the interrelationships between health and the stresses induced by socioeconomic change and uncertainty were discussed at the first workshop, papers addressing these issues were excluded from this volume in view of the fact that the NRC has just published a volume of papers on Premature Death in the New Independent States. Similarly, although the task force recognized the potential for ethnic and religious solidarities to influence the course of transformation, the NRC's recent work on Balancing and Sharing Political Power in Multiethnic Societies encouraged us to focus our attention elsewhere.
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From page 8... ...
His essay is followed by four substantively based sections: II "Institutional Change, Property Rights, and Corruption;" III "Management, Labor and Production;" IV "Social Trends, Household Behavior, and Social-Sector Policies;" and V '`The Changing Role of the State." The chapters in each section were initially presented at one of the task force workshops, where they were subjected to intense debate, and were subsequently revised for publication. Compelled to make its selection from an extraordinarily strong and diverse group of papers, the task force chose to include those papers which provided cross-national and comparative analysis, addressed major problems of explanation, provided new conceptual approaches, connected explanations with policies for intervention, and shed the most light on institutions and institutional change.
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From page 9... ...
In general, the research agenda outlined in the final section of this volume stands as a warning against the straightforward application of models based on a stylized description of the world's richest economies, the assumption that the expansion of markets and private property will suffice to move post-communist economies to prosperity, and the use of checklists to gauge the approximation of any particular economy or polity to an idealized portrait of capitalist democracies. It also calls for broader and more penetrating efforts to identify and model the political, ethnic, and economic forces channeling institutional changes, and to determine the effects of these changes on incentives, perceptions, and relationships.
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