“Socialist accounting” by Karl Polanyi: with preface “socialism and the embedded economy”

Ariane Fischer, David Woodruff, and Johanna Bockman have translated Karl Polanyi’s “Sozialistische Rechnungslegung” [“Socialist Accounting”] from 1922. In this article, Polanyi laid out his model of a future socialism, a world in which the economy is subordinated to society. Polanyi described the nature of this society and a kind of socialism that he would remain committed to his entire life. Accompanying the translation is the preface titled “Socialism and the embedded economy.” In the preface, Bockman explains the historical context of the article and its significance to the socialist calculation debate, the social sciences, and socialism more broadly. Based on her reading of the accounting and society that Polanyi offers here, Bockman argues that scholars have too narrowly used Polanyi’s work to support the Keynesian welfare state to the exclusion of other institutions, have too broadly used his work to study social institutions indiscriminately, and have not recognized that his work shares fundamental commonalities with and often unacknowledged distinctions from neoclassical economics

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

Report on an office directed to protect and coordinate aid to refugees, including current challenges, resource availability, asylum crisis, and more

Potential Humanitarian Issues in Post-War Iraq: An Overview for Congress

This report discusses the Oil For Food Program (OFFP) has alleviated some of the worst effects of the 1991 Gulf-War international sanctions regime. While some improvements have been seen in nutrition, health services, water supply and sanitation, there is greater dependence on government services, and observers of the Iraq situation have identified disturbing health and nutrition problems affecting the civilian population

Eastern Europe as a Laboratory for Economic Knowledge: The Transnational Roots of Neoliberalism

Using Latour’s concepts of “actor-network” and “translation,” the authors show that neoliberalism’s success in Eastern Europe is best analyzed not as an institutional form diffused along the nodes of a network, but as itself an actor-network based on a particular translation strategy that construes socialism as a laboratory of economic knowledge. They argue that socialism was made into a laboratory of economic knowledge during the socialist calculation debate of the 1920s and 1930s. An extensive debate during the Cold War is also documented and shows that a transnational network continued to be organized around attempts to connect the results obtained in the socialist laboratory with debates and struggles in Western economics. Finally, the drafting of transition blueprints in postcommunist Eastern Europe after 1989, with the participation of American economists, is shown to be a continuation of this transnational network

Kelet-Európa mint a közgazdaságtani tudás laboratóriuma: A neoliberalizmus transznacionális gyökerei

A szerzők – Latour cselekvőhálózat (actor-network) és átfordítás (translation) fogalmaira támaszkodva – rámutatnak arra, hogy a neoliberalizmus kelet-európai sikerét nem egy hálózat csomópontjai mentén elterjedt intézményi formaként érdemes elemezni, hanem úgy, hogy magát is cselekvőhálózatként értelmezzük, mely egy olyan sajátos átfordítási stratégián alapul, amely a szocializmust a közgazdaságtani tudás laboratóriumaként fogja fel. Eszerint a szocializmus az 1920-as és 1930-as évek szocialista kalkulációs vitája során alakult a közgazdaságtan laboratóriumává. Egy hidegháború során lezajlott széles körű vita dokumentumai szintén szerepet kapnak a tanulmányban, és arra mutatnak rá, hogy a szereplők a továbbiak során is közreműködtek egy transznacionális hálózat szervezésében azzal a céllal, hogy a szocialista laboratórium eredményeit kapcsolatba hozzák a nyugati közgazdaságtan vitáival és küzdelmeivel. Végül az 1989 utáni átmenettervezetek a posztkommunista Kelet-Európában, melyek amerikai közgazdászok közreműködésével jöttek létre, ennek a transznacionális hálózatnak a folytatásaiként mutatkoznak meg

International Coercion, Emulation and Policy Diffusion: Market-Oriented Infrastructure Reforms, 1977-1999

Why do some countries adopt market-oriented reforms such as deregulation, privatization and liberalization of competition in their infrastructure industries while others do not? Why did the pace of adoption accelerate in the 1990s? Building on neo-institutional theory in sociology, we argue that the domestic adoption of market-oriented reforms is strongly influenced by international pressures of coercion and emulation. We find robust support for these arguments with an event-history analysis of the determinants of reform in the telecommunications and electricity sectors of as many as 205 countries and territories between 1977 and 1999. Our results also suggest that the coercive effect of multilateral lending from the IMF, the World Bank or Regional Development Banks is increasing over time, a finding that is consistent with anecdotal evidence that multilateral organizations have broadened the scope of the “conditionality” terms specifying market-oriented reforms imposed on borrowing countries. We discuss the possibility that, by pressuring countries into policy reform, cross-national coercion and emulation may not produce ideal outcomes.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/40099/3/wp713.pd