Economic Thought in Communist and Post-Communist Europe

Written by leading east European scholars, this book provides a wide-ranging overview of fifty years of economic thinking under communist rule in Europe and during the first phase of post-communist economic transformation.

It is now almost a decade since central and east Europe saw the demise of the Soviet-style economic planning which accompanied more ot less authoritarian political rule by communist parties. The economic thought, based on Marxist philosophy, which formed theoretical underpinning of centrally planned socialist economies, was peculiar to the region, and was radically different from mainstream western thought. Written by leading east European scholars, this volume provides a comprehensive and authoritative resource: a wide-ranging overview of fifty years of economic thinking under communist rule in Europe and during the first phase of post-communist transformation. It also provides an analytical assessment of the impact of economic science on the reform and transition process. The book includes six country-specific studies, for Russia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Eastern Germany and Yugoslavi. Each one surveys the relevant literature and its interaction with the development of the socialist and post-socialist economic system in the period 1945-1996. The studies show that, despite Soviet dominance and the shared Marxist paradigm, development of economic thought was not uniform, a finding which supports the hypothesis formulated in the introductory chapter that differences in system critique and reform thinking can explain later differences in transformational performance. Laszalo Csaba, Budapest University of Economics, Hungary; Vladimir Gligorov, Vienna Institute for Comparative Economic Studies, Austria; Jiri Havel, Prague High School of Economic