Abstract
Ten years have passed since the publication of my book The Road to a Free Economy: Shifting from a Socialist System — The Example of Hungary. It was the first book to offer comprehensive proposals for the post-socialist transition. This chapter assesses the book as I see it ten years later.2 Is this not an extremely self-centred undertaking? An advertisement for an old book that no one is buying these days? No. There are good ethical and intellectual reasons for assessing the book, as will be made clear.
Editorial note: The present version is an adaptation of the original article Ten Years After The Road to a Free Economy: The Author’s Self-Evaluation’ published by the World Bank. The original article gave a positive appraisal of the proposals concerning the privatisation strategy proposed in the book, and was partly negative concerning the macrostabilisation programme advocated in the book. Since the present volume is dealing with privatisation, the editors omitted the second, self-critical part of the article.
The author is grateful to the symposium participants and to Zsuzsa Dániel, Stanislaw Gomulka, Karel Kouba, and Kazimir Poznanski for stimulating comments and suggestions, to Mária Barát, Ágnes Benedict, Andrea Despot, Cecilia Hornok, and Julianna Parti for efficient research assistance, and to Brian McLean for excellent translation.
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Kornai, J. (2003). Ten Years After The Road to a Free Economy: The Author’s Self-evaluation of Privatisation. In: Kalyuzhnova, Y., Andreff, W. (eds) Privatisation and Structural Change in Transition Economies. Euro-Asian Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230378339_2
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