>I like this line from Stanley Fischer...
>
>---
>
>In 1982 when you
>looked at the numbers you couldn't tell that Korea would do better
>than Latin American countries during the debt crisis, but of course
>Korea was so much more capable of taking hard, dramatic action. I
>suspect that China is more like that in terms of the political system
>and the determination of the team when they see things coming.
>
>Remember [the 1989] Tiananmen [Massacre] was politically awful but
>that was the period in which they dealt with inflation - they just dealt
>with it.
I heard Fischer give a lightly attended press conference at the WB/IMF annual meeting in 1989. At one point, he compared the prospects for Soviet reform with China's. One crucial difference, he said, was that when China started its reforms the state was totally in control - unlike Russia, where it was already decaying. Smart guys like Fischer know just how important state coercion is to the creation of "free" markets.
Doug