Series:

Routledge Revivals

5 total works

Cover of Economic Prospects - East and West (Routledge Revivals)

First published in 1987, this is an analysis of the contemporary breakdown of political and economic systems within the Eastern European communist countries. Rather than passively following the developments of this crisis, the author seeks instead to identify the reasons for failure and to examine alternative policies that offer solutions to these problems.

Jan Winiecki's work offers a comparative study of the Soviet-type economies of the East with the market economies of the West; providing a cause and effect analysis of each model, with possible scenarios for their future prospects.

Cover of Resistance to Change in the Soviet Economic System
The failure of the economic system based on the Soviet model is widely recognized, so widely in fact that many in the West cannot understand why far-reaching programmes of reforms repeatedly fail. This book uses a property-rights approach to analyze why there is such widespread and successful resistance to change. A significant group of the ruling stratum benefit considerably from their positions, particularly in terms of access to goods and services. Normally it is this very group which is entrusted with the design and, especially, the implementation of changes. Uniquely positioned to abort, distort or ultimately reverse the measures that threaten their privileges, they provide the major obstacle to reform in Soviet-type economies. Jan Winiecki argues that the most effective way of removing this obstacle would be a system of compensatory payments.

Cover of The Distorted World of Soviet-Type Economies
The Soviet Union and Eastern Europe provide unique examples of large-scale relatively highly developed centrally planned economies. In the 1980s economists in both the East and West began to focus with increasingly critical attention on the economies of the Soviet Bloc, in an attempt to explain why they were performing so poorly in comparison with the economies of the Western powers and the capitalist countries of South-East Asia.

First published in 1988 this substantial and innovative contribution to the critical literature on the economies of the former Soviet bloc is unusual in that its author is equally familiar with both Western and Eastern sources. It highlights, in particular, a discrepancy between the behaviour of individuals in Soviet-style economies and that expected of agents in a market system. It proceeds to outline how the consequent discordance between microeconomic practice and macroeconomic planning generates fundamental economic distortions.

Cover of The Distorted World of Soviet-Type Economies (Routledge Revivals)

Cover of Political Economy of Reform & Change
This book was a crucial time frame in Europe's history (ie: the period of decline and collapse of communist economic order) and later the emergence of the capitalist economic order in the post-communist Eastern Europe. Although, the last text in this book concerns Poland, the situation, apart from some Poland-specific developments, is not drastically different elsewhere.