After the demise of “real” socialism and the decline of “western” socialism, socialism can be salvaged as a social preference system oriented towards equality and social justice, to be implemented without systemic constraints in the organizational and institutional sense. At the same...

Early states like China, India, Italy and Greece have been experiencing more rapid economic growth in recent decades than have later-comers to agriculture and statehood like New Guinea, the Congo, and Uruguay. We show that more rapid growth by early starters has been the norm in economic...

This paper examines the role of money in market and centrally planned economies. It then proposes a program and sequence of institutional, macroeconomic and monetary reform aimed at achieving a stable transition. An egalitarian redistribution of the state's custodial assets to its citizens is...

This paper looks at public support for the creation of a market economy in Eastern Europe. As a data base, the Central and Eastern Eurobarometers surveys are employed, covering up to 21 countries over a time period of 1990-96 and totalling more than 100000 observations on individuals. The...

This paper examines the question of whether a communist nation, characterized by state ownership of the means of production and a centrally planned command system of allocation can be transformed into an efficient market oriented economy without fully compromising the socialist ideals of an...

Using three alternative models that incorporate the behavior of both credit constrained and unconstrained firms in a theoretically consistent manner, this paper presents evidence on the effects of economic liberalization of 1991 in India. Two robust conclusions emerge from the estimation of the...

Just when China’s leaders receive conflicting signals of “overheating” and “below-potential growth”, they encounter tremendous external pressure to revalue the Renminbi (RMB) substantially. Our conclusion is that the major macroeconomic challenges have their roots in China’s...

This paper examines the phenomenon of real-income stagnation (in which real-income growth is negligible or negative for a sizable uninterrupted sequence of years). It analyzes data for four decades from a large cross-section of countries. Real income stagnation is a conceptually distinct...