Monetary restraint in Poland does not operate in the expected manner under the conditions of predominant state ownership of both banks and industrial enterprises. With effective owners' control being prohibitively costly in the state-owned firms, "nobody's" banks continue their old lending...

Poland and Hungary, the most persistent tinkerers with the Soviet economic system, became also the first communist countries to have allowed debates on the need to rearrange the structure of property rights in the economy as a way to improve its performance. Elsewhere, until the end of the...

Regardless of one's stand on the privatisation issue, there is certainly one point on which all protagonists and antagonists of privatisation agree. This is the political importance of the issue in question. Privatisation part of the transition to the market system is a major political, nor only...

The inability to cope effectively with the legacy of the Soviet-type economy is compounded by autonomous policy errors. Apart from too nervous reactions to monthly changes in the inflation rate, the major mistake has been the timing and scale of tightening monetary policy. The sharp increases in...

Various market-type reforms have been introduced into the economies of Eastern Europe in recent years. These have often been warmly applauded in the West, but their success so far has been at best marginal. Without radical changes in the fundamentals of the Soviet-type economic system such...