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 here.
Related Papers
-
My paper with Clifford Gaddy, "To
Restructure or Not to Restructure: Informal Activities and Enterprise Behavior
in Transition" discusses the restructuring problem in Russian enterprises.
-
Russia's financial crisis is discussed in Russia's
Virtual Economy, which appeard in the September/October 1998 issue
of Foreign Affairs.
For materials on the Russian Economic Crisis click here.
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This page was prepared by Barry W. Ickes
Last updated: October 20, 2001
bwickes@psu.edu
http://econ.la.psu.edu/~bickes/index.htm