Disruption and Continuity in Bulgaria’s Agrarian Reform

The Bulgarian land reform process is burdened by a fundamental tension between disruption and continuity. This tension arises from the dual roles played by the nomenklatura in the transition to a market economy. Both roles stem from their privileged status in the old order. While the nomenklatura have the potential to provide the agricultural sector with indispensable human capital, they also have the' potential to extract rents from the sector, thus undermining its competitiveness. Both the productivity of nomenklatura capital and their capacity to extract rents are diminished to the extent that the reform disrupts the established agrarian order. Thus in order to succeed, the agrarian reform process must sail between Scylla and Charybdis. Too much disruption degrades economic productivity, possibly to the extent of threatening the viability of the reform movement itself. Too much continuity skews the distribution of political power in favor of the nomenklatura, which may undermine the competitiveness of the nascent free market institutions. This chapter develops a formal political-economic model of this trade-off. The model challenges the conventional political economic wisdom that decoupling politics from economics will improve economic performance. In particular, we identify conditions under which the quality of the transition is enhanced by coupling the nomenklatura's acquisition of political power to the magnitude of the rents that they extract

Conflicting identities: solidary incentives in the Serbo-Croatian war

Conflict elites often mobilize by distributing to their constituents solidary incentives to participation. Although elites find this strategy relatively cost-free at mobilization time, it greatly limits their action possibilities at conflict settlement time. The non-retractability of solidary incentives limits the ability of leaders to accommodate their adversaries. It thereby tends to produce protracted conflicts. This article draws upon the Serbo-Croatian conflict to illustrate this general proposition. It shows how distributions of solidary incentives contributed to the protractedness of the 1990-95 conflict between Croatia and Serbia following the dissolution of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The reliance of political leaders on solidary incentives also helps account for subsequent difficulties in implementing the Dayton Peace Agreement. The article concludes by reflecting on how the non-retractability of solidary incentives could affect practical strategies for producing peace in this setting