This paper first examines various definitions of Kornai?s soft budget constraint (SBC) and the difficulties involved in interpreting data on losses, subsidies and financing, and then considers selective evidence from transition economies. Stocks of overdue trade credit are no larger than in...

Soft budget constraints (SBCs) are a persistent feature of transition economies and have been blamed for i.a. a lack of fiscal consolidation and sluggish growth. EU eastward enlargement has - among other things - been conditioned on tackling SBCs. This paper analyzes such outside conditionality...

The soft budget constraint syndrome, first identified and studied by Janos Kornai, arises when a seemingly unprofitable enterprise is bailed out by the government or the enterprise's creditors. In other words, the enterprise is not held to a fixed budget, but finds its budget constraint...

Why some party-states collapse and others don't? Why some transformations are accompanied by economic crisis while others by economic growth? Are first political or economic transformation strategic alternatives? This paper comprises the essence of the author's comparative research on...

Pareto-improving economic reforms that also simultaneously achieve efficiency can be implemented through a strategy of "dual-track" liberalization. Its success requires the feasibility of the original plan and its continued enforcement by the state. The Chinese experience demonstrates that such...

We compare organizational forms (U-form and M-form) in coordinating changes such as innovations in business firms and reforms in transition economies. In our model, organizational forms affect the information structure of an organization, and thus the way to coordinate changes and to experiment...