The paper analyzes common issues emerging from the recent experience with Fund-supported programs in Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. These comprise the initial price-overshooting and the output collapse, fiscal sustainability as well as the financial and structural problems associated with bad loan portfolios and sluggish implementation of privatization programs. Substantial success, in varying degrees, has been achieved in the initial macro-stabilization and opening-up effort. At the same time mounting difficulties with fiscal and monetary control may be emerging, as a result of social and political pressures and insufficiently clear policy signals on the micro-issues involving the sharp structural transformation of the productive and financial systems.

Economic reform, structural adjustment, macroeconomic stabilization, and participation in the world economy are interconnected aspects of the same issue: the long-term economic viability of centrally planned economies in the rapidly changing economic environment of the modern world. Any economic strategy that focuses on only one or two of these aspects at the expense of the others is likely to fail; yet even strategies that build on all of these bases may well fail unless political leaders can muster exceptional skill, garner international support, and enjoy some good luck. The contributions to this volume reflect the recent research on this issue by various specialists on the economies of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Each author emphasizes macroeconomic stabilization, structural adjustment, participation in the larger world economy, or ecomonic reform.

This paper discusses issues related to the sequencing of the reforms that are necessary to transform the economies in Eastern Europe into market economies. It is first argued that the transition path of these economies will be smoother and less costly if a clear statement of the ultimate goals of the reforms is made at the outset. Interdependence between different aspects of the reforms implies that an appropriate strategy is to move on a broad front from the very beginning of the transformation process dealing simultaneously with macroeconomic stabilization, price reforms and convertibility, and privatization of state enterprises. It is also argued that a rapid reform process is preferable to a gradual one.

This incisive report identifies and describes the major policy choices to be made and discusses what will work and what will not.

This text features interviews with three of the key human actors behind the reforms in Eastern Europe: Lesek Balcerowicz, Polish Deputy Prime Minister and Minsiter of Finance, 1990-91; Peter Akos Bod, President of the National Bank of Hungary and formerly Minister of Industry; and Vaclav Klaus, Prime Minister of the Czech Republic and Czechoslovakian Minister of Finance. The conversations include discussion about their personal and intellectual formation, their views of the development and design of the reform package, their initial expectations, the process of implementing the reforms and the prospects for the future.

Hungarian Kornai (economics, Harvard U.) analyzes stabilization and reform in eastern Europe and appeals for solidarity and individual rights. He characterizes the problems of stabilization and adjustment as painful but necessary conditions of sustainable growth, and the reforms of what he calls premature welfare states as disproportionately large in relation to the resources available. He emphasizes the ethical implications and historical roots of the problems and the political conditions and consequences of change. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR