UNU Update: WIDER book launch in Moscow

	UNU Update
	The newsletter of United Nations University and its network of research and training centres and programmes
		Issue 13: December 2001

WIDER book aims to energize debate
on post-Soviet economic transition

The editors of a new book on the efforts of 28 socialist countries to move toward a market economy say that by focusing on economic conditions and the strength of institutions they hope to add new life to the debate over economic transition in the post-Soviet era.

Cornia (left) and Popov at the Moscow
launch of Transition and Institutions: The
Experience of Gradual and Late Reformers

Vladimir Filonov/Moscow Times

The book, Transition and Institutions: The Experience of Gradual and Late Reformers, is a publication of UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU/WIDER). Co-editors Vladimir Popov and Giovanni Andrea Cornia, spoke at the official launch of the publication in Moscow November 5.

The book argues that the economic strength of former socialist and communist countries at the beginning of the transition explains only 60 percent of the variations between them. An equally, if not more important, factor in determining the success or failure of a country's transition is the strength of its institutions, primarily its ability to collect taxes and enforce the law.

Popov said that Russia suffered more than all the former socialist states because key figures like Yegor Gaidar and Viktor Chernomyrdin too drastically cut spending on ordinary government, including health care, education and law and order. "The story of post-socialist transformation in the former Soviet Union was much more a story of government failure than of market failure," said Popov, head of research at the Russian Academy of the National Economy in Moscow. "No other government in the world reduced real government spending as much as Russia."

Transition and Institutions: The Experience of Gradual and Late Reformers is published by Oxford University Press.

The policy brief, Inequality, Growth and Poverty in the Era of Liberalization and Globalization, by Giovanni Andrea Cornia and Julius Court, is now available online and by mail order from UNU/WIDER, Katajanokanlaituri 6 B FIN-00160, Helsinki, Finland.

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