Marketization and Democratization: The Sino-Soviet Divergence

Abstract

The natural starting point should be the definition of the concepts appearing in the title. The danger, however, is that an attempt to provide comprehensive definitions at the outset may not only prove to be excessively lengthy and cumbersome, but ultimately also to a large extent futile because of its abstractness. That is why I shall reduce the ‘definitionary introduction’ to a minimum.

This paper was written in the summer of 1992 in the course of the author’s visiting fellowship at the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics which offered excellent facilities for research in all respects. Comments from Professor Anders Åslund, the Institute’s Director, and from Dr Sten Luthman, as well as help from Dr Örjan Sjöberg, are gratefully acknowledged. The paper has also benefited substantially from discussion of an earlier version in the seminar on The Politics of Eastern Europe Transformation organized by the Research Centre of King’s College, Cambridge UK, as well from the debate at the Barcelona IEA Conference on Democracy and Development in December 1992. Helpful comments were also received from an anonymous referee for the Cambridge Journal of Economics. Needless to say, responsibility for the views expressed in the paper lies entirely with the author.