Abstract
Four years after the 1917 Russian revolution, V.I. Lenin warned his fellow communists that to complete the transition to a centrally planned economy would take “at least a century”. If this was deemed appropriate for a transition that basically involved centralisation of ownership of all production assets and the creation of one central command structure presiding over the entire economic activity of a country, then the reverse process of transferring the economy’s assets and responsibility for economic decisions to a universe of individual economic agents that have to interact with each other in a completely new, competitive market context should require at least an equal amount of time for its successful completion. Assuming this perspective, it is surprising to find that the general expectation among the population in the reforming countries (RCs) of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union at the beginning of the transition was that through a liberalisation of economic activity, it would be possible to bring about a rapid transformation of the economic system and, hence, a rapid improvement in living standards.
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Zecchini, S. (1997). Transition approaches in retrospect. In: Zecchini, S. (eds) Lessons from the Economic Transition. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5368-3_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5368-3_1
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