Pinter on NATO "bandits"

[Wojtek Sokolowski]

At 10:09 AM 5/3/99 -0400, Doug Henwood wrote:
>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.
>

Exactly.  Another point is that the word "reformed the most" seemed to be
applied retroactively on countries that for historical reasons are most
successful.  This is regardless of the nature and extent of actual
institutional changes in th eregion that oftentimes were mostly nominal
(see for example the edited volume by Hausner, Jessop and Nielsen (eds),
_Strategic Choice and Path Dependency in Post Socialism in the
Transformation Process_, Aldershot (UK) and Brookfiled (US): Edward Elgar,
1995., esp. paper by David Stark who argues that a great deal of
privatisation in Hungary was mainly nominal changes of ownership status).

Hindsight rationalization - a classical trick of the neo-classical economic
theory.

Wojtek