Product Description: Priests of Prosperity explores the unsung revolutionary campaign to transform postcommunist central banks from command-economy cash cows into Western-style monetary guardians. Juliet Johnson conducted more than 160 interviews in seventeen countries with central bankers, international assistance providers, policymakers, and private-sector finance professionals over the course of fifteen years...read more

Product Description: In the United States, we now take our ability to pay with plastic for granted. In other parts of the world, however, the establishment of a "credit-card economy" has not been easy. In countries without a history of economic stability, how can banks decide who should be given a credit card? How do markets convince people to use cards, make their transactions visible to authorities, assume the potential risk of fraud, and pay to use their own money? Why should merchants agree to pay extra if customers use cards instead of cash? In Plastic Money, Akos Rona-Tas and Alya Guseva tell the story of how banks overcame these and other quandaries as they constructed markets for credit cards in eight postcommunist countries...read more

Product Description: Does socialism have a future in the world of the twenty-first century? If not, what is the future for progressive politics? This is a major contribution to contemporary social and political thought written by one of the world's leading critical historians...read more

Product Description: Transforming Socialist Economies: Lessons for Cuba and Beyond argues that countries with centrally-planned economies can pursue divergent paths towards market liberalization. The book reviews the reform processes of China, the Central Asian Republics, Eastern Europe, Russia, Vietnam, and the role of the international financial institutions, and draws lessons for Cuba, a country on the verge of wider economic transformation...read more

Product Description: Economic Lessons from the Transition focuses on major transitions in the 1990s: the transition from central planning and communism to market capitalism and the global integration of national financial systems. The transitions were supposed to raise most peoples' standard of living; instead they dramatically worsened the lives of most people in the countries involved...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy was one of the major events of the 20th century. This book demonstrates why this transition process is so complex and why it comes in so many shapes. (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Does law play a role in the economies that are moving from Soviet-style socialism to market capitalism? The essays in this book examine that question, providing a vivid picture of how the new institutions of capitalism affect the lives of business people, legal practitioners, investors, and bureaucrats. They analyze the determinants of successful institutional reform, suggesting that law can influence economic behavior even in inhospitable environments.Contributors--including economists, political scientists, and legal and business scholars--examine the pathways through which legal and institutional reforms affect behavior and identify the circumstances under which such reforms add value. They ask: What are the microeconomic mechanisms by which law contributes to the activities of economic agents? How do the characteristics of economic agents affect their ability to use the law? Which spheres of the economy are most affected by institutional reforms and where does law fail? What are the preconditions for effective legal and institutional reforms? Which types of political processes produce a workable system of economic legislation? The focus throughout is on the analysis of the individual economic agent who is subject to the new institutions, and thus the decisions of the individual actor, the shopkeeper, the lawyer, the court, the legislator-politician, the enterprise, the bureaucrat, the regulatory authority, and the outside investor.There are lessons on research methodology, on the economic role of institutions, and on the practice of institutional development. The focus is on the transition economies, but the conclusions and methodologies are pertinent when understanding the role of law in any context. The book will be important reading for scholars and practitioners with a wide range of interests and in a wide range of disciplines and of interest to all those concerned with economic, legal, and institutional development, economists, political scientists, lawyers, and development specialists alike.Peter Murrell is Professor of Economics, University of Maryland, College Park.

Product Description: This Occasional Paper examines the institutional and operational praticalities of inflation targeting for emerging market countries. The paper concludes that the foundations for successful, full-fledged inflation targeting are built on a strong fiscal position and entrenched macroeconomic stability; a well-developed financial system; central bank instrument indepenence and a madate to achieve price stability; a reasonably well understood transmission mechanism between monetary policy actions and inflation; a sound methodology for constructing inflation forecasts; and transparent monetary policy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Book by Wolf, Holger C.

Product Description: Using empirical examples from Western economies and post-socialist economies of Eastern Europe, this text explores the development of markets and the problems of transition. The authors assert that liberalization and privatization alone are insufficient in creating a successful market economy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Radical change seems to be the only panacea for inefficient economies. This work takes a look at the financial system and its function in socialist central planning economies. It provides an explanation of the partial reforms in socialist economies from the 1950s to 1988...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)