Perestroika and public choice: the economics of autocratic succession in a rent-seeking society

Mikhail Gorbachev has been widely acclaimed in the West for his reform policies of perestroika and glasnost. Until quite recently, many pundits boldly declared that Gorbachev’s USSR was actually embarked on an abandonment of the Communist economic system, and would eventually embrace real democracy and a free market (see, for example, Muravchik 1990, p. 25). While recent developments have rendered these forecasts obsolete, the Gorbachev round of reforms surely represents an interesting problem in public choice.