This book addresses the policy questions surrounding the challenge of transforming eastern European economies from their planned, administrative past to vibrant market-based entities.
Jozef van Brabant considers in turn, the wider set of challenges facing these economies - stabilization, privatization, liberalization, institution building, and developing and maintaining the sociopolitical consensus - before examining the evolving role of the state.
Using concrete examples from the eastern European countries throughout, including the Czech Republic and Bulgaria, this work...

This volume in essence continues my recent contributions towards building up a better understanding of the wide range of obstacles besetting the transitions away from administrative planning in the former communist regimes in the eastern part of Europe. It is self-contained, however. As such, it specifically addresses issues revolving around how best to govern economies, and indeed societies more generally, that are undergoing fundamental structural transfor mation, and whether industrial policy can facilitate progressing with the vexing transformations that will have to be enacted over a...

This volume focuses on the important issues raised by the recent economic reforms of the centrally planned economies of China, South-East Asia, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Participation in the international trade regime and how this may be affected by the economic reforms; implications of the reforms for economic relations with developing countries and development assistance performance; participation in international monetary and financial regimes and how this may be affected by economic reform; and the impact of economic reform on regional integration schemes are all analysed in...

Bringing the eastern European economies in transition (defined more precisely in the Introduction) under the economic, political, and secu rity umbrella of the European Union (ED) has been an ambition of many of these countries from the very start of the so-called annus mirabilis in 1989. The road to gratification of this aspiration since then has been rather bumpy, however one wants to look at recent events. Indeed, since 1989 the relationship between the EU and the economies in transition has been ebbing and flowing with the evolution of two main strands of policy stances in the EU. One has...

With the revolutions in Eastern Europe since mid-1989, two main transformations are envisaged: pluralistic political democracy and a market economy based largely on private property and self-interest. One element that straddles those two objectives is what to do with state-owned property during the transition from a planned to a market environment.

First published in 1980, this book offers an account of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), the regional institution overseeing East European economic integration at the time. The author pursues three main themes in analyzing the sluggish pace of East European integration on trade, the role of East West relations in the integration process, and the future of integration in the 1980s. Firstly he maintains that the integration process was delayed because of the confused postwar situation and disagreement among leaders of the region over a common economic programme for...