> -----Original Message-----
> From: J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. [SMTP:rosserjb at jmu.edu]
> Sent: Monday, May 03, 1999 3:50 PM
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> Subject: Re: Poland
>
> Doug,
> Poland's debt reduction certainly helped, but was
> not the end all and be all. Hungary did not have one
> and has been doing nearly as well as Poland. Of course
> they had very different strategies vis a vis privatization
> which were related to this issue. Hungary has emphasized
> selling off its assets to foreign multinationals as its way of
> privatizing. This is also more gradual than the instant
> privatization voucher schemes pushed by our Bates Medal
> Winner, Shleifer, that have been such miserable failures in
> the CR and Russia. But one at least gets a fresh injection
> of finance, new tech, access to foreign markets, and
> managerial restructuring out of it.
> OTOH, Poland has been much more leary of opening
> to foreign direct investment, with much of that related to a
> residual fear of German domination. (Much of the fdi in
> Hungary has come from the much less scary Austria,
> associated nostalgically with the Habsburgs).
> The issue is that the debt reduction in Poland made
> potential foreign investors more leary of going into Poland.
> But that was just fine with the Poles. The Hungarians wanted
> fdi and thus have put up with continuing to make high
> interest payments on their left over debts from their days
> of Kadaresque "goulash communism" and soft budget
> constraint market socialism.
> BTW, the CR and Slovakia did not have this legacy of
> foreign debts or of hyperinflation as the starting point of their
> transitions was that of a very rigid command socialism.
> Barkley Rosser
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com>
> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
> Date: Monday, May 03, 1999 2:17 PM
> Subject: Poland
>
>
> >J. Barkley Rosser, Jr. wrote:
> >
> >>Curiously, Poland, which you pose as a highly reformed
> >>economy (and it is) has been much slower to privatize.
> >
> >Poland also got a 50% debt cancellation, no? How important was that?
> >
> >Speaking of Poland, Wojtek, I'd like to hear your opinion of the
> early
> >1980s Solidarnosc.
> >
> >Doug
> >