“The Transition Problem: The Unhampered State as an Obstacle to Democratic and Market Reforms” via CIPE Development Blog
Major systemic transformations in the post-Soviet states are over. Yet the outcome in most cases is not a full-fledged democratic market economy but rather an unsatisfactory compromise between socialism and free markets. Transition countries by and large focused their energies on creating a “social market economy” à la Western European welfare states. Thus, socialism as a system of completely centralized decision-making has been replaced by interventionism, a system with various degrees of state involvement in economic affairs. This “third way”-ism took the place of Marxism as an ideological pillar of the new post-communist world; however, it failed to produce a viable alternative to how the goal of greater social well-being can be accomplished.
In this Feature Service article,...