From Anti-equilibrium to The Socialist System and Beyond

This essay attempts to understand János Kornai’s works from a political economy perspective. It argues that Kornai has significantly contributed to the formation of a new paradigm of political economy. The main endeavor of Kornai has been the combination of analytical concepts of economics with the empirical description of real economies. After a certain period of theoretical experimentation János Kornai formulated his research program that can be called the shortage economy explanation of the socialist system. The Economics of Shortage and The Socialist System have created a new theoretical paradigm in a framework in which it has become possible to establish a connection between the analytical and empirical, universal and historical aspects of the theory studying the socialist system as a real economic entity. János Kornai has built his analysis of the socialist system on the primary role of politics in the creation of economic institutions. In his present work on capitalism he has extended this thesis to the capitalist system. This seems to be an important contribution of his to a new political economy paradigm that is just in the process of formation

And the first shall be the last

This study analyzes the puzzle of Hungarian economic drifting in a long run perspective. The underlying puzzle for the investigation is why bad policies are invariably popular and good policies unpopular, thus why political and economic rationality never overlap. The first part of the article summarizes in eight points the basic features of the postwar period. Then six lessons are offered, which might be useful for other countries in transition or for students of comparative economics and politics, lessons that can be generalized on the basis of the individual country experience

New trajectories of the Hungarian regional development: balanced and rush growth of territorial capital

The basic assumption of the paper is that numerous similarities exist between the patterns of economic growth and territorial capital growth. The rush economic growth and rush growth of territorial capital are compared empirically at Hungarian micro-regional level from 2004 until 2010. After normalizing the dataset, a very novel spatial econometric method is applied, called a penalty for bottleneck. The results show that the constant rush growth of territorial capital is as harmful as economic recession. On the other hand, the decrease of infrastructural and social capital caused the rush growth of territorial capital in this period. Moreover, the key findings of two case studies suggest that the balanced growth of territorial capital will be created by the falling social inequalities and increasing infrastructural capita

Job Growth in Early Transition: Comparing Two Paths

Small start-up firms are the engine of job creation in early transition and yet little is known about the characteristics of this new sector. We seek to identify patterns of job growth in this sector in terms of niches left from central planning and ask about differences in job creation across two different transition economies: Estonia, which experienced rapid destruction of the pre-existing firms, and the Czech Republic, which reduced the old sector gradually. We find job growth within industries to be quantitatively more important than job growth due to across-industry reallocation. Furthermore, the industrial composition of startups is strikingly similar in the two countries. We offer convergence to "western" industry firm-size distributions as an explanation. We also find regularities in wage evolution across new and old firms, including small differences in job quality across the two transition paths.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/39888/3/wp503.pd

The determinants of vulnerability to currency crises: country-specific factors versus regional factors

We investigate the determinants of exchange market pressures (EMP) for some new EU member states at both the national and regional levels, where macroeconomic and financial variables are considered as potential sources. The regional common factors are extracted from these variables by using dynamic factor analysis. The linear empirical analysis, in general, highlights the importance of country-specific factors to defend themselves against vulnerability in their external sectors. Yet, given a significant impact of the common component in credit on EMP, a contagion effect is apparent through the conduit of credit market integration across these countries under investigation

Resolving the infinitude controversy

A simple inductive argument shows natural languages to have infinitly many sentences, but workers in the field have uncovered clear evidence of a diverse group of ‘exceptional’ languages from Proto-Uralic to Dyirbal and most recently, Pirahã, that appear to lack recursive devices entirely. We argue that in an information-theoretic setting non-recursive natural languages appear neither exceptional nor functionally inferior to the recursive majority