ABSTRACT
Most countries began to liberalize in a state of crisis. In many cases, crises were creeping, in the sense that over a long period governments were responsible for setting policy signals toward delinking domestic prices from world market prices. The experience of many aborted liberalization attempts suggests that governments that were unwilling to change the structure and volume of subsidies paid to the clientele failed to meet the consistency requirement of liberalization. Given the very different economic structures in developing countries and newly industrialized countries, any clustering of countries according to common issues of liberalization is debatable. With the exception of Hong Kong and partly Singapore, all developing countries and the newly industrialized countries have begun to open their economies to the world market in a period in which their governments more or less actively interfered in the private sector.
