Econ372readings

Economics 472
Economics of Transition Readings

By clicking on the appropriate paper you can download selected papers for this course. All papers are in pdf format. To read them you need the Acrobat Reader, which can be downloaded for free by clicking here. Note that to read some of these papers you must be accessing the web via your PSU account.

Here are some articles that may be of interest to the student of transition. Many appear on our syllabus.

Basic Readings on Soviet-type Economies

Ericson, Richard, "Command Economy" forthcoming in the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics will be the classic article on this subject. You cannot read a better article on this topic.

Ericson, Richard, "The Classical Soviet-Type Economy: Nature of the System and Implications for Reform," Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall, 1991.

Gur Ofer, examines "Soviet Economic Growth: 1928-1985," Journal of Economic Literature, December 1987

My paper on the Dimensions of Transition in Russia. This paper was published in B. Granville and P. Oppenheimer, editors, Russia's Post-Communist Economy, Oxford University Press, 2001.

Gregory Grossman examines the experience of the Mormons with central planning in his paper, Central Planning and Transition in the American Desert: Latter-day Saints in Present-Day Sight.

Selected Readings on the Transition

John McMillan and Oleh Havrylyshyn debate gradualism versus the Big Bang.

Stanley Fischer and Alan Gelb analyzed the "Process of Socialist Economic Transformation," early in the transition period.

Stanley Fischer and Ratna Sahay examine Transition Economies After Ten Years.

Here is a survey paper I wrote with Sergei Guriev that explains the differences in economic peformance among countries in transition based on microeconomic issues. Some of the tables are quite interesting.

Here is a recent article by World Bank Chief Economist Joseph Stiglitz that discusses the errors of the Washington Consensus, entitled "For Economists No Time to Party." You can read a fuller exposition of his ideas in his paper, "Whither Reform: Ten Years of Transition." A related article by Stiglitz and David Ellerman is also available here.

Anders Aslund presents an opposite view to Stiglitz in his paper, "Why Has Russia's Economic Transformation Been So Arduous."

Josef Brada asks whether Privatization is Transition.

Here is a recent paper by Simon Commander, Mark Dutz, and Nicholas Stern that looks at the role of ownership in restructuring.

Here is a survey paper by Megginson and Netter, “From State to Market: A Survey of Empirical Studies on Privatization,” Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. 39, No. 2, June 2001.

Here is the paper by Djankov and Murrell, “Enterprise Restructuring in Transition: A Quantitative Survey.”

Here is a paper by Bernard S. Black, Reinier Kraakman, and Anna Tarassova, that describes some of the most egregious aspects of Russian privatization and corporate governance. It is by lawyers who were involved in the process. It was recently published in Stanford Law Review, Vol. 52, pp. 1731-1808, 2000.

Here is another paper that examines Lessons from Fiascos in Russian Corporate Governance by Michael Heller and Merritt Fox.

Timothy Frye and Andrei Shleifer compare the Invisible Hand and the Grabbing Hand.

Fabrizio Coricelli and Nauro Campos examine "Growth in Transition: What We Know, What We Don't and What We Should."

Elisabetta Falcetti, Martin Raiser and Peter Sanfey write about "Defying the Odds: Initial Conditions, Reforms and Growth in the First Decade of Transition."

A compendium of papers on the Russian economy entitled, Russia's Uncertain Economic Future, collected for the Joint Economic Committee of the US Congress.

Carlo Cottarelli and Peter Doyle explain how inflation was tamed in transition economies.

Some Readings on the Chinese Experience

Here is a paper by Yingyi Qian that looks at "The Institutional Foundations of China's Market Transition."

Li, Wei, “A Tale of Two Reforms,” Rand Journal of Economics, 30, 1999.

Li, Wei, and Dennis Tao Yang, "The Great Leap Forward: Anatomy of a Planning Disaster," JPE, 113, 4, August 2005.

Newspaper Articles

Here is an article on Russian Health, and mortality of males from the Washington Post.

Here is David Remnick's reporting from ten years ago on the August coup of 1991.

Here is an interesting article by Tony Judt on Romania, why its transition is so difficult, from the New York Review of Books.

Sources of Information on Transition

Policy Research Working Papers from the World Bank. Abstracts are on line and full texts are available in PDF format.

Working Papers from the EBRD.

The William Davidson Institute has working papers from many researchers in transition.

The Transition Newsletter has information and short articles about transition.

Finance and Development, a quarterly publication of the IMF, has articles on transition written by specialists from the IMF and World Bank.

The Transition Economics Working Paper Series from the Social Science Research Network has hundreds of working papers on transition.

In addition you can find a list of lecture notes on various topics by clicking h e re.

Newspaper Articles

Sources of Information on Transition

Related Papers