János Kornai Book order

Eight essays connected by various common strands. The most important one is the community of the main subject-matter: socialism, capitalism, democracy, change of system. These four expressions cover four phenomena of great and comprehensive importance. Each piece in the book deals with these and the connections between them. One of the Leitmotifs is the "capitalism/socialism" pair of opposites. Capitalism has a history of several hundred years, while the socialist regime existed only for a few decades. But this pair of opposites was central to the history of the twentieth century. This antagonism put its stamp on political thinking, on the foreign policy and military preparedness of every country, and on some appallingly destructive armed conflicts. All these had great secondary influence on each country’s economic development and the standard of living and disposition of its inhabitants. None of the studies is confined to one country—not to Hungary or to any other. Each tries to embrace the problems common to greater units. However, the greater unit comprehended is not the same in each study. One may deal with the capitalist or socialist system in general, another will all the post-socialist countries, and a third the Central East European region. But all extend the analysis beyond the borders of one country.

This comparative study explores the similarities and differences between the United States and China in an important arena of overlapping concern: how best to harness public-private collaboration to accomplish some of each society's most vital collective purposes.

Reform of the welfare sector is an important yet difficult challenge for countries in transition from socialist central planning to market-oriented democracies. Here a scholar of the economics of socialism and a health economist offer health sector reform recommendations for ten countries of Eastern Europe, drawn from nine guiding principles.

Beneficial social and economic exchange relies on a certain level of trust. But trust is a delicate matter, not least in the former socialist countries where illegitimate behaviour by governments made distrust a habit. The chapters in this volume analyze the causes and the effects of the lack of social trust in post-socialist countries. The contributions originated in the Collegium Budapest project on Honesty and Theory and Experience in the Light of the Post-Socialist Transition. A second volume entitled, Building a Trustworthy State in Post-Socialist Transition , is being published simultaneously.

Focusing on the example of Hungary, this text examines the problems faced today by all Eastern European economies, in the light of the rapidly changing political situation. The author criticizes the practice of state ownership, calling instead for the liberalization of the private sector.

These seven essays by the Eastern block's most important economist address and explore many of the critical social and economic issues inherent in the socialist economy. Published in Hungary in 1983, they are the firsthand observations of an insider who attempts to be as frank and impartial as possible about the experiment in his own country. The essays distinguish the classical or traditional form of a highly centralized socialist economy from a system, like that of Hungary's, that is in the process of institutional reforms. They focus on a few important characteristics of social economies, rather than providing a broad description and analysis of socialist systems, in order to stimulate thinking along comparative lines. The wider problems and issues related to socialist systems that they address will interest sociologists and political scientists, historians, and philosophers as well as economists. Kornai points out that because real modern societies are different from the pure models of capitalism and socialism, combinations and mixtures of socialist and capitalist systems, sellers' and buyers' markets, centralized and decentralized management occur widely and intensively in both socialist and highly developed industrial market economies and in the nonsocialist third world countries in some segments and to a certain degree. Looking at these phenomena comparatively reveals both the deep differences and the similarities and analogies between the systems. The essays are: The Reproduction of Shortage. "Hard" and "Soft" Budget Constraint. Degrees of Paternalism. Economics and Psychology. Comments on the Present State and the Prospects of the Hungarian Economic Reform. Efficiency and the Principles of Socialist Ethics. The Health of Nations. JÄnos Kornai is Professor of Economics at the Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest.