Central European University Press Systems, Institutions, and Values in East and West: Engaging with János Kornai's Scholarship

In this volume, leading social scientists, empirical analysts, and policy practitioners demonstrate the various ways in which the insights of János Kornai, a renowned early analyst and critic of the command economies of Eastern European communist states, are stirring academic and policy discussions about current challenges. While dissecting the economic theories and practices in the Soviet Bloc, Kornai devised and applied concepts such as soft-budget constraints, rush versus harmonic growth, surplus versus shortage economy, non-Walrasian equilibrium, bureaucratic coordination, and the invisible power of the communist party. These concepts are commonly applied to a variety of issues in the contexts of fundamental transformation. The cases discussed in this volume include the transitional paths of postcommunist economies, the pitfalls of East European market-building, economic repercussions of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the process of integration in the Eurozone. The volume concludes with János Kornai's remarks about the value of democracy and other research topics, delivered at the conference celebrating his 90th birthday in February, 2018. Review The originality of this book lies in its thorough investigation of almost every aspect of János Kornai's work. It explores Kornai's oeuvre with regard to socialism, capitalism, post-socialist transition, as well as different economic sectors such as health economics, fiscal rules and independent fiscal institutions, balanced economic growth, European integration and systemic approach, and finally the importance of democracy versus autocracy in all post-socialist experiences including China and Hungary. Last but not least, the conclusive words of János Kornai may be considered as his intellectual testimony, in which he addresses overarching themes of his long intellectual journey (from his 1955 PhD thesis Overcentralisation, until now) and offers some perspective about the way his work might be extended and deepened in the future by the new generation of economist.--Mehrdad Vahabi About the Author Dora Piroska is currently an Associate Professor at the Economic Policy Department at the Corvinus University of Budapest. Miklos Rosta has been working at Corvinus University for 10 years and is now an Associate Professor of Economics and Head of Department at the Department of Comparative Economics of the Corvinus University of Budapest.