Pinter on NATO "bandits"

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Mon May 3 07:09:24 PDT 1999


Brad De Long wrote:


>At least when I look at east central and east Europe, I see that those
>countries that have reformed the most (the Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary)
>are best off, those that have reformed partly (Slovakia, Russia) are at
>least semi-stable, and those that have reformed least (Ukraine, Belarus)
>are doing worst of all.

A classification scheme that suggests that the capacity for "reform" isn't an exogenous variable. Those countries that have "reformed" the most are those that were fairly rich and industrialized before World War II, and those that have "reformed" the least were among the poorest and most colonized. So I don't see how much the degree of "reform" explains in itself, since the capacity for "reform" must itself be explained.

Doug



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