Coping with political resistance to economic reform via CIPE Development Blog
Every country in the need of economic reform faces the same conundrum: if there is a broad consensus among experts on the direction such reforms should take and if we know what reforms have proven successful elsewhere, why don’t they just spread from country to country? Johnny Munkhammar, Senior Fellow at the European Enterprise Institute, talks about this issue and explores the reasons for political resistance to market reforms in his book The Guide to Reform. The concern all reformist governments have was well captured by Jan-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, whom Munkhammar quotes: “We all know what to do, but we don’t know how to get re-elected once we have done it.”
Although Munkhammar’s analysis is focused on the OECD countries, it is applicable...