Peculiarities and Limits of the Second Economy in Socialism (The Hungarian Case)

Between Hopes and Reality : About Civil Society and Political Participation in Hungary Between 1990 and 2010

“…Second, the state tries to make the second economy dependent on the first one as the source of its raw material, tools and even markets. (Galasi, 1985) environment in which the living standard is relatively high, compared to other socialist countries, and informal activities are allowed in order to a slow accumulation of personal wealth and increasing this standard of living. (Miklós Szabó, 1989) This lead to the duplication (or multiplication) of the mechanisms, which rendered the social stratification as well.…”

The Gift Economy and State Power in China

“…At this point, the reasons why the Chinese gift economy cannot be confused with bribery, barter, black market, and commodity economy, and thrown together with them into a catch-all bag of the second economy become evident. The second economy in state socialist society has been defined in many ways by scholars of Eastern Europe: Its activities are for private gain or are considered illegal by the state (Grossman 1977); they are outside of state plans (O'Hearn 1980); or the second economy is a subordinate but complementary counterpart of the first economy, distinguished from the first economy by budgetary constraints that decree survival on the basis of profitability (Galasi 1985). The assertion that the second economy serves a function as "a partial substitute for the missing market mechanism" that avoids the "rigidity, delays, inefficiency, disequilibria, and inconsistencies" (Grossman 1982:101) of the command economy is better applied to commodity economy than what I have described as the gift economy.…”

“…Note that a tripartite scheme 3 is proposed for the cultural economy of power in Chinese socialist society rather than a dual economy scheme made up of the official (or first) economy and the shadow (or second) economy (Grossman 1977(Grossman , 1982Galasi 1985), or of the formal and informal sectors (Sampson 1985). There is a tendency in the writings on the second economy of Eastern European and Soviet societies to conflate the dynamics of the gift economy and the commodity economy.…”