ABSTRACT

Ever since the demise of the former Soviet Union, the economies of Central and East European countries have drawn considerable attention. This is because of their attempts to move away from the highly centralized systems to a free market regime. While many other countries have also been trying to move in that direction, these economies constitute a special case because of their centralized structures. In a way they offer almost a controlled experiment going from one extreme to another. And no country exemplifies such an attempt more than Poland. This is because of its adoption of the so called “big bang” approach when Solidarity first came to power in 1989. While it would be interesting to analyze not only all of the countries of the former Soviet empire and also all policies designed to achieve the desired market orientation in these countries, that would be a task beyond any single volume. Our aim is more modest and restrictive. What we hope to achieve in this short monograph is to confine ourselves to three countries: namely, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland as a background and then concentrate on Poland. However, while the exercise is specifically carried out with reference to Poland, our hope is that the model proposed and the estimates and the data series constructed are prototypes of the transition economies and thus have broad applications in this region.