Why economic reforms fail in the Soviet system: a property rights–based approach

Democratization and Economic Reform

“…The obvious contrast here is between reform, as we usually understand the term, and revolution-as three Eastern European finance ministers have taken great pains to point out (Balcerowicz 1995, Blejer & Coricelli 1995, Kolodko 1999. Although there are some rough similarities between import-substitution industrialization in Latin America and state socialism, most notably with respect to protectionism, rentseeking, authoritarian politics, and poor economic performance (especially during the 1980s), they should not detract from key differences between these two sets of economies-for example, state intervention versus state ownership, markets (albeit imperfect) versus state planning, money as the indicator of purchasing power versus political power as the currency of favor, unemployment versus the labor hunger of enterprises, considerable social inequalities versus limited inequalities, and, finally, economies based on consumer sovereignty versus economies based on "shortage" (Hirschman 1968(Hirschman , 1987Winiecki 1990;Kornai 1992).…”

State governance evolution in resource-rich transition economies: An application to Russia and Kazakhstan

“…Monolithic industrial structures in the Soviet Union were fundamental institutions of state and state building aimed at minimising the transaction costs of political control and monitoring of the structure of rent collection (Nygaard, 2004). The beneficiaries (in a Shleifer and Vishny sense) of this structure of rent and political centralisation included the party apparatus (Gill, 1990) and the economic/industrial bureaucracy (Winiecki, 1996). The endogeniety issue in demand for institutions thus also extended to the mode of industrial organisation and structure of state.…”

New Institutional Economics in the Post‐Socialist Transformation Debate

“…They suggest that the interests of authoritarian governments (which is what the new economic history literature is primarily concerned with) are best served by a property rights structure which is designed to maintain a high rate of economic growth rather than extract political and economic rents. 2 Winiecki (1990aWiniecki ( , 1990b) draws on the new economic history theory of the state to analyse institutional change in Soviet type economies. He argues that the resistance of the communist party apparatchiks presents a significant barrier to shifting to a more efficient property rights structure.…”