Worker Ownership and the Current Crisis

There are so many crises these days (coronavirus, global warming) that this paper seems already out of date since we are referring to the crisis caused by the neoliberal post-socialist transition policies in East Europe and elsewhere in the post-socialist world.

Knowledge and Institutional Change

This paper attempts set forth systematically some of the knowledge questions that determine certain strategies for institutional change.

Voucher Privatization with Investment Funds

This paper has been cited many times as the representative critique of voucher privatization with investment funds.

Neoclassical Economics as the New Social Engineering

This is a paper on the role of neoclassical economics in the disastrous “Big Bang” or “shock therapy” advice given by Western academics and Western advisory agencies to the post-socialist countries. It is part of the Oxford Handbook of Professional Economic Ethics.

1991 clippings on work in Slovenia

Here are a few newspaper and magazine clippings from my efforts in Slovenia in 1990-91 to get a worker-ownership privatization law drafted and passed.

Helping People Help Themselves

The full title to this book is: Helping People Help Themselves: From
the World Bank to an Alternative Philosophy of Development Assistance. The book is an intellectual analysis, giving a full history of the relevant ideas, of the various modes of “helping” in general and development assistance in particular.

Why Shock Therapy was Wrong

This article in Challenge May-June 2003 tried to pull together thoughts on two questions: the overall institutional change strategy and the alternatives to and arguments against voucher privatization.

Wall Street Capitalism as “The Model” for Market Economies

This paper addresses the way the American “Wall Street Capitalism” embodies the irresponsible disconnect between action and the results that markets (unlike governments) are supposed to prevent. This paper is in the Slovene journal Theory and Practice that dates back to 1964.

Lessons from East Europe’s Voucher Privatization

This article examines the “economic” arguments put forward in favor of voucher privatization and it gives an institutional analysis of how the investment funds might be expected to behave in spite of expectations seen through rose-colored glasses. As one of the “great” social experiments of the late 20th century, some lessons for the future are drawn.

Lessons of the Moldova ARIA Project

This paper, coauthored with Vladimir Kreacic, describes a remarkably successful World Bank project in the poorest of the countries of the former Soviet Union. It contains many lessons for development projects elsewhere.