The Culture of Policy-Making in the Transition from Socialism: Price Policy in Mongolia

Murrell, Peter; Dunn, Karen Turner; Korsun, Georges

doi:10.1086/452262

Cited by 21 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…Our model complements Berkowitz (1996) by considering situations where the government values a relatively equal distribution of economic welfare, again finding that state-sector price controls can form an optimal second-best policy. 8 The generalization of the argument in this paper is simply that initial conditions are very important for transitional socialist economies.…”

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confidence: 89%

Income distribution and price controls: Targeting a social safety net during economic transition

Alexeev

Leitzel

2001

European Economic Review

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During the ongoing post-communist economic transitions, the relative well-being of many people is changing rapidly, and governments are not well positioned to accurately measure individual living standards. Under such circumstances, continued price controls over basic consumer goods within the state sector, and the associated queuing, can form a serviceable device for targeting poor people for subsidies. With a fixedprice state sector and free-price parallel markets, rich people might choose to avoid queues and shop in the free markets, while poor people would prefer to pay low nominal prices and queue in the state sector. The targeting of subsidies through queues, therefore, can be accomplished even if the government has no information on individual income or living standards. When the alternative to price controls is a poorly targeted explicit social safety net, the resource cost of queues might be more than compensated for by an improvement in the targeting of subsidies.

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confidence: 89%

Income distribution and price controls: Targeting a social safety net during economic transition

Alexeev

Leitzel

2001

European Economic Review

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“…This section provides only the information necessary for an understanding of the issues most pertinent to this paper. For further detail, see Boone [1994] on stabilization, Murrell et al [1996] on price liberalization, and Korsun and Murrell [1995] on privatization.…”

Section: Mongolian Reforms and The Institutional Environmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Competition and privatization amidst weak institutions: evidence from Mongolia

2000

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Mongolia's mass privatization program was implanted in a country that lacked the very basic institutions of capitalism. This paper examines the effects of competition and ownership on the efficiency of the newly privatized enterprises, using a representative sample of enterprises and controlling for possible selection biases. Competition has quantitatively large effects; perfectly competitive firms having nearly double the efficiency of monopolies. Enterprises with residual state ownership appear to be more efficient than other enterprises, reflecting an environment where the government was pressured to focus on efficiency and institutions gave little voice to outsider owners. (JEL P0, L1, L33, O12)

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“…6 In addition, so much of institutional advance is informal: when 4 See Decree 01/91 of Federal Ministry of Finance of Czechoslovakia and a report in the Foreign Broadcast Information Service, volume EEU-91-214, p. 13. 5 For a picture of the myriad ways in which dramatic liberalization measures are muted and an argument that the culture of policymaking is central, see Murrell, Dunn and Korsun (1996). 6 Stark (1992) goes as far as to argue that it is inappropriate to speak of one transition process, rather than many distinctive transformations.…”

Section: Institutional Reconstructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Far Has the Transition Progressed?

Murrell

1996

Journal of Economic Perspectives

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127

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As the opening contribution to a four-page symposium, this paper provides an overview of the economic transformation in reforming countries of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, describing reforms, their consequences, and lessons economists might derive from transition. The topics covered are political developments, liberalization, institutional reconstruction, reforms of systems for social protection, and the early results of transition. The final section considers future possibilities in the light of the last few years' events, concluding that the process of democratic capitalism is well established in central Europe, but uncertainty still prevails in most of the former Soviet Union.

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The Culture of Policy-Making in the Transition from Socialism: Price Policy in Mongolia

Cited by 21 publications

References 4 publications

Income distribution and price controls: Targeting a social safety net during economic transition

Income distribution and price controls: Targeting a social safety net during economic transition

Competition and privatization amidst weak institutions: evidence from Mongolia

How Far Has the Transition Progressed?

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