Socialist Economies in Transition

Appraisals of the Market Mechanism

Edited by Mark Knell, NIFU Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education, Norway and Christine Rider, Associate Dean, College of Business Administration, St John’s University, US

Socialist Economies in Transition provides a coherent critique of economic reform in Eastern Europe which, it is argued, will create not prosperity but high levels of unemployment and severe economic dislocation. The authors show how the application of neo-classical economic theory will, in reality, prove unsuccessful and explain why, despite the revolutionary upheavals of 1989 and the immense effort to discard the restraints of planning, the intuitive mechanisms and practices of the free market have been so slow to appear.

‘This excellent collection of articles serves as an argument for caution in interpreting where the formerly socialist economics are going. . . or why they began their transition to whatever in the late 1980s. . . This book provides a valuable collection of essays coherently addressed to this important historical moment and process. . . Social economists should be particularly interested in this book’s descriptions of, and central concern with, the social costs of these historical transformations. The essays are uniformly well written and easily accessible to an undergraduate student.’
– Christopher J. Niggle, Review of Social Economy