Toward Capitalism or Away from Russia?: Early Stage of Post‐Soviet Economic Reforms in Belarus and the Baltics

While at the start of systemic economic transformations in Eastern Europe, both indigenous reformers and Western observers tended to interpret the events as a rationally conceived and executed replacement of an economic system of inferior performance by another one whose superiority was proven, the developments that followed the disintegration of the Soviet polity did not support this view. Shortly after the former Soviet republics gained independence, they exhibited marked variations in speed and sometimes direction of market transformation that could not be satisfactorily explained within the framework of economic theories used by promoters of reforms. In this paper I compare the early stages of economic transformation in Belarus, where reforms were eventually abandoned, with the three Baltic states (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia), which are the most successful emerging market economies among the former Soviet republics. In this comparison I will attempt to highlight non-economic factors that might have contributed to this difference.     

Constructing a World Fit for Marxism: Utopia and Utopistics of Professor Wallerstein

A bstract .   World system theory, founded and developed by Immanuel Wallerstein, continues Marx's original vision of modern economy as a zero-sum game based on exploitation. Ignoring convincing criticism of Marx's economics, Wallerstein broadens spatial confines of the applicability of Marxist economics to include the whole world. Imaginatively combining Marxist and postmodernist frames of reference, Wallerstein constructs a future economic and social system reminiscent of a classical Marxist utopia. This endeavor, which Wallerstein calls "utopistics," provides a logical conclusion to world system theory, as it finalizes a practice of defending Marxian analysis of the past and the present in terms of an imagined future.     

Lottery Incentives and Resource Management: Evidence from the Agricultural Data Reporting Incentive Program (AgDRIP)

Environmental and Resource Economics - To manage resources effectively in an agri-environmental context, policymakers need information about on-farm management practices and ecological conditions....