To understand the pressures for and against fundamental economic restructuring, the first part of the course elaborates a set of concepts (shortage, soft-budget constraints, redistributive bureaucracy, etc.) for analyzing the basic institutions of the socialist economy. Patterns of investment, enterprise decision-making, labor markets, and the reward and allocation of labor will be examined form a comparative institutional perspective in which the specificity of capitalist and socialist institutions are revealed by their mutual contrast. The fundamental prescriptions for restructuring these institutions are also critically examined.
The second part of the course examines the diverse paths of institution building in four postsocialist economies. In analyzing the "fall of communism", we observe that differences in how the pieces fell apart have important consequences for how economic and political institutions are reconstructed in the current period. Each of the subsections of this part of the course address a specific theme through a particular country focus. By examining problems of markets and hierarchies, property rights, and organizational change in another socio-economic context, the student should gain insights and analytic skills of general applicability.
The final part of the course will be organized around the research interests of the seminar participants focussing especially on problems in the contemporary period. Themes might include: legal frameworks, the changing politics of accounting, new institutions of capital markets, labor and social issues, the role of international monetary institutions, employment restructuring, entrepreneurship, new patterns of stratification, and the environment.
