Frank Bönker - Böcker

This book is a methodologically self-conscious and intellectually ambitious effort to advance the social science debate on postcommunist transformation beyond the limitations of its first decade. Offering theoretically innovative and empirically current analyses of fundamental economic, cultural, and political problems of systemic change and reform in central and Eastern Europe, the authors broaden and deepen the research agenda by developing a set of interrelated approaches that are cross-disciplinary, sociologically informed, historically comparative, and global.The book’s major substantive themes revolve around problems of postcommunist socioeconomic transformations. Specifically, the book explores postcommunist systemic change, the role of religion and collective identity, the significance of trust and economic culture, patterns of state-economy interactions in enterprise restructuring, the context of EU expansion, the strengths and weaknesses of economic theory and neoliberal doctrine, and the history of ideas in the postcommunist transformation debate. Bringing together leading experts in the field to illustrate the fruitfulness of multidisciplinary analysis in understanding socioeconomic transitions, this work will be valuable for economists, sociologists, and political scientists alike.

This book is a methodologically self-conscious and intellectually ambitious effort to advance the social science debate on postcommunist transformation beyond the limitations of its first decade. Offering theoretically innovative and empirically current analyses of fundamental economic, cultural, and political problems of systemic change and reform in central and Eastern Europe, the authors broaden and deepen the research agenda by developing a set of interrelated approaches that are cross-disciplinary, sociologically informed, historically comparative, and global.The book’s major substantive themes revolve around problems of postcommunist socioeconomic transformations. Specifically, the book explores postcommunist systemic change, the role of religion and collective identity, the significance of trust and economic culture, patterns of state-economy interactions in enterprise restructuring, the context of EU expansion, the strengths and weaknesses of economic theory and neoliberal doctrine, and the history of ideas in the postcommunist transformation debate. Bringing together leading experts in the field to illustrate the fruitfulness of multidisciplinary analysis in understanding socioeconomic transitions, this work will be valuable for economists, sociologists, and political scientists alike.

This insightful book examines the necessary conditions for the successful initiation and consolidation of unpopular economic reforms. Drawing on the burgeoning literature in the area of policy reform, it features a comparative analysis of fiscal reform in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic at different stages of the post-communist transformation. This analysis demonstrates that a significant number of the national differences in fiscal reform can be attributed to differences in political constraints. It also reveals that these very constraints change in the course of transformation and have become increasingly similar to the 'standard' restrictions which exist in the traditional EU and OECD countries.This in-depth analysis of the changing role of political determinants in post-communist fiscal reform will strongly appeal to economists and political scientists interested in the political economy of policy reform, post-communist economic transformation and the role of international organizations (IMF, EU) in shaping domestic policy-making. Policy analysts interested in fiscal reform in Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic will also find much to interest them in this book.