From Chaotic to state-led capitalism

New Political Economy

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2008, Pages 177-184

  Lane, David ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CAPITALISM; GLOBAL ECONOMY; POLITICAL ECONOMY; STATE LED DEVELOPMENT;

EURASIA; RUSSIAN FEDERATION;

EID: 47049115601     PISSN: 13563467     EISSN: 14699923     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13563460802018505     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. Based on data for the 1980s (before the fall of state socialist regimes), seven state socialist countries were ranked in the top United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) 'high human development' category of 53 states: Czechoslovakia (ranked 27), Hungary (30), USSR (31), Bulgaria (33), Yugoslavia (34), Poland (41) and Albania (49). The rankings are out of a total of 163 countries. Data used are life expectancy at birth, adult literacy, mean years of schooling and GDP. United Nations Development Programme, UNDP, Human Development Report 1991 (Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 119-21.
2. John Williamson, 'What Washington Means by Policy Reform', in John Williamson (ed.), Latin American Adjustment. How Much has Happened? (Institute for International Economics, 1990).
3. The 'varieties of capitalism' literature attempts to define models that are useful tools for contemporary capitalist societies. They ignore energy-based economies such as Saudi Arabia, developing countries such as Brazil, societies in transformation as in central and eastern Europe, and economic systems such as China, which operate with only partial markets and state-led entrepreneurship. For an overview, see David Coates, 'Models of Capitalism in the New World Order: The UK Case', Political Studies, Vol. 47, No. 4 (1999), pp. 643-60.
4. The major recent works are Peter A. Hall & David Soskice (eds), Varieties of Capitalism, (Oxford University Press, 2001)
5. Bruno Amable, The Diversity of Capitalism (Oxford University Press, 2003)
6. David Coates, Models of Capitalism (Polity Press, 2000).
7. Hilary Appel, A New Capitalist Order: Privatization and Ideology in Russia and Eastern Europe (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), p. 105.
8. By 1994, 16,462 enterprises - approximately half the total of formerly state-owned enterprises - had been privatised. Andrew Barnes, Owning Russia: The Struggle Over Factories, Farms, and Power (Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 76.
9. See Marshall Goldman, The Piratization of Russia: Russian Reform Goes Awry (Routledge, 2003). 10 As Joseph Stiglitz has put it: 'if privatisation is conducted in ways that are widely regarded as illegitimate and in an environment which lacks the necessary institutional infrastructure, the longer-run prospects of a market economy may actually be undermined. Worse still, the private property interests that are created contribute to the weakening of the state and the undermining of the social order, through corruption and regulatory capture.' Joseph Stiglitz, 'Whither Reform? Ten Years of the Transition', in Ha-Joon Chang (ed.), The Rebel Within (Anthem Press, 2001), p. 132.
10. By state capture, private bodies are able to effect changes on the state to promote their own interests. Study of legislation has shown that regional legislatures have been subverted by business interests and that this has had an adverse effect on development. World Bank, From Transition to Development: A Country Economic Memorandum for the Russian Federation (World Bank, 2005).
11. Stiglitz, 'Whither Reform?', p. 134.
12. The ownership share of financial companies in Russian industry in 1999 amounted to only 10.4 per cent. See David Lane, 'The evolution of post-communist banking', in David Lane (ed.), Russian Banking: Evolution, Problems, Prospects (Edward Elgar, 2002), p. 18.
13. See Claudia M. Buch, Ralph P. Heinrich, Lusine Lusinyan & Mechthild Schrooten, 'The political economy of banking reform and foreign debt', in Lane, Russian Banking, p. 211, fn. 5.
14. John Thornhill & Charles Clover, 'Robbery of Nations', Financial Times, 21 August 1999, p. 6.
15. Index is a three-year average. World Bank,World Development Indicators 2006, http:/Devdata.worldbank.org/wdi2006, Table 5 (accessed August 2007).
16. Ibid.
17. EBRD, Transition Report (EBRD, 2003), p. 18.
18. UNDP, Human Development Report 2005, www.hdr.undp.org/reports/ global/2005 (last accessed April 2007).
19. Ibid., p. 220.
20. Ibid., pp. 230-1.
21. Lawrence King & David Stuckler, 'Mass Privatization and the Postcommunist Mortality Crisis', in David Lane (ed.), The Transformation of State Socialism: System Change, Revolution or Something Else? (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). For example, of men aged between 15 and 60 in 2000-1, in Russia 42.4 per cent have a probability of dying before the age of 60. The comparable figure for the USA is 14.1 per cent and UK 10.9 per cent. Cf.
22. World Bank, Dying Too Young (World Bank, 2005).
23. UNDP, Human Development Report 2005, p. 231. In 1998, 21.8 per cent of the population (32 million people) earned less than the subsistencewage of 423 rubles (US$70) amonth.Data fromthe RussianState StatisticsCommittee, reported byAP, 2May 1998 (reproduced in Johnson's List, an email letter, www.cdi.org/russia/johnson).
24. UNDP, Human Development Report 2002 (Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 194-5.
25. H.H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills, 'Introduction: The Man and His Work', in H.H. Gerth & C. Wright Mills (eds), From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 66.
26. I developed this concept in an earlier article: David Lane, 'What Kind of Capitalism for Russia? A Comparative Analysis', Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol. 33, No. 4 (2000), pp. 485-504.
27. Michael Useem, The Inner Circle: Large Corporations and the Rise of Business Political Activity in the US and UK (Oxford University Press, 1984)
28. John Scott, Corporations, Classes and Capitalism (Hutchinson, 1985), p. 246.
29. Jonathan Story & Ingo Walter, Political Economy of Financial Integration in Europe (Manchester University Press, 1997), ch. 7.
30. As Michel Camdessus has put it: 'I cannot emphasise strongly enough that Russia cannot afford to take this [corporatist] route', 'In Search of a Vision to Revitalize Reform', St Petersburg Economic Forum, 16 June 1999, www.imf.org (accessed June 1999).
31. See Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks & John D. Stephens, 'Convergence and Divergence in Advanced Capitalist Democracies' in Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks & John D. Stephens (eds), Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 427-60.