This book contains 21 papers focusing on a wide range of issues concerning financial sector transition in the countries of Europe and Central Asia (ECA). It places the transition economies in the context of recent and prospective developments in global financial markets. This book also evaluates the experience of the last 10 years and reviews the progress from a command financial system to a market-based one, identifying some of the key characteristics of the financial transition.

Besides providing a historical record of the long road from the economic agenda of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution to the present transition from communism, this book can be considered a staunch defense of market capitalism and liberal democracy. Any celebration of the current transition in Eastern Europe necessarily affirms the superiority of a market system over a non-market one and of a democratic system over a non-democratic one. The author does not deny the failures, shortcomings or imperfections of market economy and democracy. Nor does he take the survival of market capitalism and...