Currency and Financial Crises of the 1990s and 2000s

We survey three distinct types of financial crises which took place in the 1990s and the 2000s: 1) the credit implosion leading to severe banking crisis in Japan; 2) The foreign reserves’ meltdown triggered by foreign hot money flight from frothy economies with fixed exchange rate regimes of developing Asian economies, and 3) The 2008 worldwide debacle rooted in financial institutional opacity and reckless aggregate demand management, epicentered in the US, that spread almost instantaneously across the globe, mostly through international financial networks

The State Socialist Mortality Syndrome

Death rates for working-age men in European state socialist countries deviated from general improvements in survival observed in the rest of Europe during the 20th century. The magnitude of structural labor force changes across countries correlates with lagged increases in death rates for men in the working ages. This pattern is consistent with a hypothesis that hyper-development of heavy industry and stagnation (even contraction) of the service sector created anomic conditions leading to unhealthy lifestyles and self-destructive behavior among men moving from primary-sector to secondary-sector occupations. Occupational contrasts within countries similarly show concentration of rising male death rates among blue collar workers. Collapse of state socialist systems produced rapid corrections in labor force structure after 1990, again correlated with a fading of the state socialist mortality syndrome in following decades

Tea Leaves and Productivity: Bergsonian Norms for Gauging the Soviet Future

Abram Bergson's attitudes toward the reliability of Soviet statistics and the feasibility of socialism took shape in two distinct phases. He convinced himself and the profession by 1953 that Soviet data were ‘usable’ and that socialism could conceivably outperform capitalism. However, he reversed field a decade later on the issue of merit concluding that while the USSR would survive, negative factor productivity growth made it inherently inferior. Both predictions proved problematic. Negative factor productivity growth was never confirmed by Goskomstat's figures. The numbers had to be adjusted for ‘hidden inflaion’ to get this result, but these ‘corrections’ compromised the claim that Soviet statistics were ‘reliable’. Likewise, the Soviet Union's demise casts a cloud over the ‘usability’ both of official and adjusted statistics. There is nothing in these series that explains Mikhail Gorbachev's and Boris Yeltsin's haste in scuttling Command Communism. Comparative Economic Studies (2005) 47, 259–273. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ces.8100108

The Illusion of Westernisation in Russia and China

Russia and China have similar heritages. They were and remain authoritarian martial police states, deviating substantially from the cultural, institutional, and behavioural requirements of efficient democratic free enterprise. Both modernised without westernising (preserving their authoritarian martial police states), but with conspicuously different results. These disparities are catalogued, analysed and attributed to cultural factors inclining Beijing to pursue a disciplined, value-adding development strategy that is nearly the antithesis of Moscow's reliance on natural resource extraction and rent-seeking. China's relative authoritarian success, and its stellar growth performance vis-à-vis western democracies leave open the question of comparative systems merit. Could some authoritarian martial police states be superior to democratic free enterprise as some scholars are beginning to suggest? Close scrutiny indicates that they cannot; that authoritarian systems are crisis prone, dynamically inferior and welfare diminishing after the advantages of relative backwardness have been exhausted in the long run. Comparative Economic Studies (2007) 49, 495–513. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ces.8100232