Organization, Performance, And System Choice : East European Agricultural Development

This book examines the relative performance of different types of agricultural organization in Yugoslavia, Poland, and Bulgaria, considering some key issues in agricultural development and some specific aspects of system performance and choice in the contexts of less-developed countries.

When one has worked on a series of projects as long as I have on those that make up this book, one incurs a tremendous debt that can never be appropriately acknowledged. Nevertheless, I would be remiss if I did not make note of at least the largest and most obvious of contributions made by others. The oldest part of the work is the Yugoslav case study, which began as my doctoral dissertation. I received funding from the International Research and Exchanges Board (IREX), which allowed me to spend an all-too-brief but productive five months in z&greb in 1982. During this time, I was greatly aided by the advice and criticism of Professor Vladimir Stipetic of the University of Zagreb. As I worked on the dissertation, John Pencavel and Evsey Domar taught me much about critical thinking and clear writing, as well as economics. To them I owe a special debt of gratitude for the often difficult task they undertook of simply keeping track of my whereabouts. In addition, the Yugoslav study benefited from the critical contributions of Paul David and members of the development and history seminars at Stanford and the comments of Tim Bates and two anonymous referees and the editor at the Review of Economics and Statistics, where the core material was first published as •The Performance of Private and Cooperative Socialist Organimtion: Postwar Yugoslav Agriculture; 69, 2 (May 1987): 205-214, copyright 1987 by Elsevier Science Publishers. I would like to thank Elsevier Science Publishers for kind permission to reprint portions of this article in chapter 3.