ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 deals with the “transition strategy debate.” The transition strategy debate involves policy arguments over what basic courses of action should be taken by the CEE and FSU countries that renounced the socialist planned economy as well as by countries, such as China and Cuba, which advocate radical reform of the economic structure while maintaining the one-party rule of the Communist Party, to establish a market-oriented system. This chapter presents an overview of the transition strategy debate by systematically reviewing 140 earlier works that contributed to the radicalism-versus-gradualism debate, which was the center of the transition strategy debate, and examines the relationship between debate attitudes and literature attributes by means of statistical and econometrical methods. The results of the literature survey in this chapter indicate that radicalists maintain a monolithic debate attitude, as a whole, while that of gradualists is more diversified. In fact, the latter can be divided into slow-paced gradualism, step-by-step gradualism, and eclectic gradualism groups, whose respective presences are almost balanced. There is also a group of researchers who take a middle ground between radicalism and gradualism, keeping their distance from these two extreme viewpoints but still participating in the radicalism-versus-gradualism debate. Furthermore, a cross-tabulation analysis and regression estimation of a qualitative selection model provide deep insight regarding the relationship between the debate attitudes and the literature attributes in related studies.
