by Pranab Bardhan
All of the articles in this series can be found here.
In the 1990’s Andrei Shleifer was only one among many in the proselytizing army of reformers who went out to the transition economies, mainly in Central and Eastern Europe but also in developing countries, to make them ready for capitalism. They were in a hurry to implement reforms of liberalization and privatization according to some general, often one-size-fits-all, formula. The purse strings of emergency financial help by international organizations like the IMF and the World Bank and US agencies like USAID were also controlled by stern macro-economic ideologues of ‘structural adjustment’. The reformers were in possession of the canonical gospels which it was their sacred duty to spread among the heathens as quickly as possible, given the golden opportunity after the fall of the godless communists and socialists.
I went to some of the international conferences on the Economics of Transition in this period, held usually in cities like Budapest or Prague or Riga. Soon I gave up going to such conferences as I felt I did not know enough of those countries to really say anything that’d make sense to the local audience. But I did go to one organized in Kolkata by the eminent political economist Mancur Olson. (Mancur grew up in a Norwegian-American family in North Dakota. When he came to know that the name Mancur, a traditional name in such Scandinavian families, was a variation of the Arabic name Mansoor, he speculated: “In fanciful moments, I imagine a Viking raid on the Levant.”) I had admired his past work on collective action and I thought he deserved a Nobel Prize for that work, which he did not get. When he asked me to contribute to a collection of essays on institutional economics he coedited, I gladly did. Read more »