ABSTRACT
The nations of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, now making the transition from administrative-socialist to market-capitalist economies, have become the favorite testing ground for orthodox Western economic theory. Western economic advisers have collaborated with Eastern economic policymakers to push for the implementation of programs of economic restructuring designed to build new Western-style capitalist economies from scratch. A striking feature of the economic strategies and policies being pushed in the East is the extent to which they are grounded in neoclassical economic theory and divorced from the historical legacies, and the associated political and social realities, of the societies involved.
