Abstract
Experience with the transition from plan to market has varied greatly across the reforming socialist countries. By the start of 1996 transition countries fell into three broad categories — growing, recovering, and lagging (Table 1). In the first category, China and Vietnam have experienced uninterrupted growth in real GDP since the beginning of their reforms in 1978 and 1986, respectively. Poorer and more rural than the socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union, they started reforms under very different structural and macroeconomic conditions (see Sachs and Woo, 1994; McKinnon, 1994). In particular, their state sectors were relatively small, household savings were low, and they were under-financialised. This was in sharp contrast to the high household savings that had produced a large money overhang in most CEE and NIS countries at the start of reform. Also, China’s trading relations were independent of the planned CMEA system, whose collapse disrupted trade in CEE and NIS, while Vietnam was only partially integrated into this system.
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de Melo, M., Gelb, A. (1997). Transition to date: a comparative overview. In: Zecchini, S. (eds) Lessons from the Economic Transition. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5368-3_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5368-3_3
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