Doug wrote:
I saw Stanley Fischer give a thinly attended press conference at the World Bank/IMF annual meetings in the early 1990s - can't remember what year exactly. Fischer said that Russia was beginning its economic reforms with a very weak state, while China began its with the state still firmly in control. I thought that was interesting, coming from a prominent neoliberal theorist-practitioner like Fischer (now governor of the Bank of Israel).
One of the main points that Stiglitz always emphasised during his time at the World Bank is that of "sequencing"; in Russia, his argument went, they privatised/marketised before "democratising" with respect to creating a more equal society, and in China they democratised before privatising.