ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the Polish experience of reform in the middle 1990s compared with postwar Japanese experience. The postwar Japanese economy had worked along the line of recovery oriented and growth oriented reform policies apart from very short periods of tight monetary policy in 1946 and 1949. Although Japanese postwar reform has usually been classified as a gradual method, its structural change was very radical. By stability reform, the actual basic structure of production would be unchanged, the unemployment rate would be stark being in the vicinity of 15 per cent. Particularly for transition economies to reform from a centrally planned and state-owned monopolistic production system to a market competitive system, government intervention should be the first of all activities. Usually economists have assumed the two patterns of a "radical reform" and a "gradual reform" and with their distinctive features they have applied the patterns to actual transition economies.