Description
Book SynopsisThis landmark book provides an up-to-date assessment and evaluation of industrial reform in 14 countries. Topics covered in detail include the changing role of the industrial enterprise, the state and private sectors, privatization, pricing, foreign trade and direct foreign investment. Emphasis is placed on events since 1989, the year of 'revolution' in Eastern Europe.
Few of the countries are now traditionally 'socialist'. Cuba and North Korea can be so described, economically and politically. China and Vietnam grapple with market-orientated economic reforms while in the firm grip of the Communist Party. Other countries are now at various distances along the road to democracy and the market. These 'emerging democracies' or 'emerging market economies' face new and formidable challenges in making the transition from predominantly state-owned, planned economies to market economies based on private property. East Germany has been reunited with the Federal Republic, but the former industrial sector has been badly hit. The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, on the other hand, are disintegrating. Their emerging, independent states face daunting tasks; one critical question is whether they can form voluntary and sustainable economic unions.
This book provides authoritative up-to-date studies of industrial reform in socialist countries and will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the transition to market economies in post-Communist societies.
Trade Review'. . . the book contains a wealth of information on the current process of industrial restructuring and transformation in the former Centrally Planned Economies (CPEs). The editor is to be congratulated on putting together a highly readable set of essays on these very important problems. It should become required reading for students of the political economy of transformation as well as for the specialists and practitioners dealing with the problems of restructuring in the former CPEs.' -- Igor Filatochev, The World Economy
Table of ContentsContents: 1. Industrial Reform in Historical Perspective (I. Jeffries) 2. Albania: the Purge of Stalinist Ideology (A. Schnytzer) 3. Innovation with an Unchanging Core: No Path to the Market in Bulgaria? (R.J. McIntyre) 4. Industrial Reform in China (R.C. Hsu) 5. Industrial Reform and the Cuban Economy (A. Zimbalist) 6. Industrial Reform in Czechoslovakia (L. Rychetnik) 7. East Germany (I. Jeffries) 8. Hungary (P. Hare) 9. Mongolia (M. Kaser) 10. North Korea (I. Jeffries) 11. Poland (G. Blazyca) 12. The Romanian Enterprise (A.H. Smith) 13. The Soviet Industrial Enterprise in the 1980s (G.E. Schroeder) 14. Industrial Reform in Vietnam (M. Beresford) 15. Reform in Yugoslavia: the Retreat from Self-Management (S. Estrin and L. Takla)
