Bureaucratically organized systems tend to be less efficient than economies in which agents are free to choose their output targets, as well as the means to meet them. This paper presents a simple model of planner-manager interactions and shows how bureaucratic economies can end up in a...

Market-oriented economic reforms in centrally planned economies have altered the functions and objectives of key policy instruments, particularly in the case of fiscal policy. As a result of reform, economic management requires the use of “indirect” levers to regulate the behavior of...

This paper reviews the main features of market-oriented foreign trade reforms in planned economies. It considers reform initiatives aimed at expanding enterprise autonomy and breaking up the state monopoly of foreign trade, modifying the exchange rate system, and reforming the domestic price...

This paper analyzes budgetary subsidy policy issues that arise when centrally planned economies move toward a market economy. The analysis suggests that subsidy reduction, to be successful, has to be embedded into an overall economic reform program and that during the program’s execution,...

This paper examines the relationship between macroeconomic stabilization and market-oriented reform in planned economies. It emphasizes that market-oriented reform should enhance the likelihood that adjustment to exogenous disturbances will involve genuine adjustment in the sense of actually...

This paper analyzes the inflationary process in a centrally planned economy which has an uncontrolled market where prices can move more freely. The maintenance of controls over prices and rationing in the economy leads to the emergence of forces that generate inflation in the uncontrolled...

Under alternative assumptions on the likely developments in external financing of PCPE transition, and based on a multi-country, forward-looking model that includes a simplified PCPE block, we simulate the response of PCPEs to a transfer of capital from the industrial countries, and assess the...

This paper reviews key areas of central banking reform in a sample of centrally planned economies undergoing transition to market-based systems. The discussion draws mainly on the experiences of four countries, Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and China. Significant efforts have been made, or...

This paper examines credit origins of the business cycle in the former Czechoslovakia. Industrial production is found to be cointegrated with various measures of bank credit during 1976-90 and it is shown that noninvestment credits are Granger-causing industrial production and that a feedback...