Product Description: In Dynamism, Rivalry, and the Surplus Economy, János Kornai examines capitalism as an economic system and in comparison to socialism. Kornai explains his view of capitalism as an economy of surplus--a chronic excess of supply of goods and labor...read more

Product Description: Reform of the welfare sector is an important yet difficult challenge for countries in transition from socialist central planning to market-oriented democracies. Here a scholar of the economics of socialism and post-socialist transition, and a health economist take on this challenge...read more

Product Description: János Kornai, a distinguished Hungarian economist, began his adult life as an ardent believer in socialism and then became a critic of the communist political and economic system. He lost family members in the Holocaust, contributed to the ideological preparation for the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and became an influential theorist of the post-Soviet economic transition...read more

Product Description: This title contains eight essays that are connected by various common strands. The most important one is the community of the main subject-matter: socialism, capitalism, democracy, change of system. These four expressions cover four phenomena of great and comprehensive importance...read more

Product Description: This book explores institutional change and economic behaviour by examining the transition process in the former socialist countries that joined the EU in 2004, looking at the growth occurring in China, offering a historical perspective on economic underdevelopment in the Middle East, and discussing the neo-classical paradigm...read more

Product Description: Building a Trustworthy State in Post-Socialist Transition considers the problems and prospects for creating trustworthy and reliable public institutions in the aftermath of the transition from socialism in Central and Eastern Europe...read more

Product Description: Beneficial social and economic exchange relies on a certain level of trust. But trust is a delicate matter, not least in the former socialist countries where illegitimate behaviour by governments made distrust a habit. The chapters in this volume analyze the causes and the effects of the lack of social trust in post-socialist countries...read more

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Product Description: Countries of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are entering the second decade of political transformation and economic reform. The new policy challenges center on the nature of the social contract between citizens and their governments...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: The three major themes of János Kornai's work reflected in the title of this book -- planning, shortage, and transition, or transformation -- figure prominently in the essays. After a philosophical introduction by Edmond Malinvaud, the book is divided into three sections: Markets and Organizations, Theory of Transition, and The Transitional Experience...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: This major book presents an objective and penetrating economic analysis of stabilization and reform in Eastern Europe, combined with a compassionate plea for individual rights and solidarity. János Kornai - one of the most famous Hungarian economists of his generation - focuses on two main issues: first, the problems of stabilization and adjustment, which are painful but necessary conditions of sustainable growth and second, the reform of the 'premature welfare state' of Eastern European countries, which is disproportionately large in relation to the resources available and which was hitherto managed in a highly centralized, bureaucratic and paternalistic way...read more

Product Description: Hungarian economist János Kornai first used the metaphor of a single path to postsocialist transition in his earlier book, The Road to a Free Economy. The new metaphor that frames this collection of recent studies reflects a broader perspective and understanding of the complexities of transition: every highway and byway leads eventually to capitalism, Kornai observes, but to what kind, how fast, and at what cost? Who wins and who loses?Kornai draws from his experiences of Hungarian reform as well as from countries of the former Soviet Union to make several major points...read more

Product Description: First published in 1959, Overcentralization in Economic Administration was the first book written by an East European and published in the West that openly criticized socialist central planning. Now reissued with a new preface, this book discusses issues that remain fundamental to any sound analysis of economic organization...read more

Product Description: To understand the dramatic collapse of the socialist order and the current turmoil in the formerly communist world, this comprehensive work examines the most important common properties of all socialist societies. JNBnos Kornai brings a life-long study of the problems of the socialist system to his explanation of why inherent attributes of socialism inevitably produced in-efficiency...read more

Product Description: Kornai, in opposition to Walrasian general equilibrium theory, developed in this work an alternative framework for a non-Walrasian type of economics, blending elements of organization theory, information theory, management science and the new disequilibrium economics...read more

Product Description: The socialist world of Eastern Europe is undergoing its second revolution of the 20th century, moving away from a centralized government to one which is more democratic. One of the central questions of this transition is how economic mechanisms may be used to help effect the change...read more

Product Description: These seven essays by the Eastern block's most important economist address and explore many of the critical social and economic issues inherent in the socialist economy. Published in Hungary in 1983, they are the firsthand observations of an insider who attempts to be as frank and impartial as possible about the experiment in his own country...read more