Academic literature on the topic 'Post-communism – Economic aspects'

The analysis of discussions on various aspects of the evolution of the modern state, the specifics of post-communist transformations and the role that Marxism and the tradition of radical socialist thought can play in the near future in their search for a way out of the crisis generated by the agony of the neoliberal global world order. As a starting point for the analysis, theoretical articles published in the second edition of the collection Communism, Anticommunism, Russophobia in post-Soviet Russia. 2nd ed., Add. / Auth.: P.P. Apryshko et al. - Moscow: World of Philosophy, Algorithm, 2021 (607 p.) were selected. A comparative analysis of the polemical works of domestic scientists, political theorists and philosophers with those discussions that for many decades have been conducted by their colleagues abroad clearly indicates that today none of the existing ideologies, as well as the paradigms of economic and socio-political theory, can pretend to be the only recourse. The experience of recent decades clearly excludes the very possibility of transforming the economy and society on the basis of a certain universal synthetic model. In post-communist Russia, the heat of political passions, which stimulates the extreme polarization of political programs for overcoming the crisis, also hinders the achievement of agreement and the search for a solution acceptable to all.

During World War II, the Allies created the United Nations and its associated international institutions to stabilize the post-war world. The Allies envisioned a coordinated world in which human rights for all were respected, economic and social progress for all promoted, and global warfare prevented. This was a phenomenally fantastic vision that seemed unattainable in the wake of the most devastating global war in history.Today, the world is witnessing some of the fruits of these mid-20th century events and aspirations, especially since the collapse of Communism in 1989. Economic integration and free trade has become much more prevalent as exemplified by astounding developments such as the European Union. And there is a greater appreciation of human rights, including the international human right to health. This article examines the evolution of trade policy and the impact of free trade policies on the health care sectors of the three countries of North America and the realization of the human right to health in North America.

Abstract Although globalization brings different countries and cultures in closer and closer contact, people are still sensitive when it comes to aspects such as cultural specificity or ethnicity. The collapse of communism and the extension of the European Union have determined an increase of interest in Romania’s image, both on the part of foreigners and of Romanians themselves. The purpose of this paper is to follow the development of Romania’s image in English travelogues in the last hundred years, its evolution from a land of “woods and water” in the pre-communist era to a “grand bazaar” in the post-communist one, with clear attempts, in recent years, to re-discover a more idyllic picture of the country, one that should encourage ecological tourism. The article is also intended to illustrate the extra-textual (historical, economic, cultural) factors that have impacted, in different ways, on this image evolution.

In this article, I argue that Marx’s philosophy does not commit us to Worrell and Krier’s claim that a post-capitalist society will be a social formation in which all social relations appear unmediated to their agents. Quite the opposite is true: given his Hegelian background, which Marx never gives up, social relations are in principle to be mediated by the results of human productive acts, and although a socialist society no longer is mediated by capital, it still cannot be thought without a legal, ethical, and political form of these relations. Those meditations (which Worrell and Krier do not separate clearly from social-economic aspects) will be universal. Accordingly, the authors’ claim that Marx is opposed to the concept of the universal is baseless. In addition, I demonstrate that Worrell and Krier’s interpretation of Marx’s concept of alienation as a romantic concept is misguided and, instead, that we would do well to focus on the concept of private property. Finally, I show that they do not properly grasp Marx’s concepts of democracy and communism.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is threefold: to examine social opinions in Poland towards the decommodified ideal type of welfare state, as developed by Esping-Andersen; to look at the extent to which this is correlated with opinions towards aspects of the Communist economy and the transition from this system; and to show how opinions on decommodification and the Communist economy and transition are multi-faceted and reflect differing socio-economic interests. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws on data obtained from a questionnaire asked to a random sample of 1,001 respondents in Poland. A factor analysis of questions related to the topic is carried out and then bivariate correlation and multivariate regression analyses are performed to test the relationship between attitudes towards decommodification and the (post) Communist economy. Findings It is discovered that the opinions of Polish society are close to many aspects of the decommodified welfare model, although these are not homogenous. There is a significant correlation between opinions towards the Communist economy and transition with the decommodified welfare state, although this weakens when the respondents are asked about more specific issues of welfare that most directly relate to their everyday lives. Originality/value The paper uses high quality data from an original data source, to both examine opinions on the welfare system and the Communist economy and transition. This allows us to better understand opinions towards the welfare state in Poland and understand how the historical legacy of Communism influences these opinions.

The subject of this research is the position of Belarus in the memory wars of Russia and Eastern European countries of the two recent decades. Based on P. Bourdieu’s theory of symbolic power, as well as comparative analysis of the key stages of the historical politics of Russia and Belarus as the members of the Union State, the author explores the causes and peculiarities of electoral neutrality of Belarus in the memory wars of Russia and Eastern European countries. Analysis is conducted on the theoretical-methodological aspects of the concept of “memory wars”. Content analysis of the relevant research reveals the specificity of the Belarusian case with regards to correlation between domestic and foreign historical politics. The specificity of the forms of post-Communism that have established in Russia and Belarus, the difference in the pace of historical politics of the last three decades, as well as the evolution of the political regime of Alexander Lukashenko contributed to the formation of peculiar position of the Republic of Belarus in the memory confrontation between Russia and its Eastern European neighbors. The internal manifestation of such position was the desire to displace the conflicts between memory communities in the republic, the movement of memory to the periphery of cultural-information space, while the external manifestation was strive for electoral neutrality (memory isolationism) in the memory wars in Eastern Europe. Such position is aimed not so much at supporting Russia’s memory initiatives, but at solving the relevant political and economic challenges, using historical politics as the instrument for promoting the own interests.

Ever since the fall of the Iron Curtain and the enthusiasm it inspired about the potential for European unity and democracy, it has become fashionable to see post-war European history in terms of convergence. Historians have researched the integration of the European continent into the global, in the context of the Cold War, decolonisation and economic globalisation. Internally, processes of convergence are seen to link the trajectories of nations on a continent where integration eventually trumped the divisions of nationalism, regionalism and the Iron Curtain. This story of an ‘ever deeper and wider union’ was also reflected in the ways in which the transformations of Southern and Eastern Europe were narrated. The idea of a so-called ‘return to Europe’ inspired histories that connected the fall of right-wing authoritarian regimes in the Southern European states of Portugal, Greece and Spain from the mid-1970s with the end of communism in Eastern Europe from 1989. This dominant account has presented Southern and Eastern European ‘peripheries’ moving towards the (Western) European core and its norms, values and models of liberal democracy. Even though some have raised objections to these teleological and Western-dominated narratives of transition they have remained strikingly potent in histories of post-war Europe. Only very recently have they received historiographical critique. Partly this is due to the enduring appeal of centre-periphery approaches that continue to influence intellectual debates about European identity and history. This is also because research on the transitions in Southern and Eastern Europe has for a long time remained rather insular. Historians have been slow to enter a research field that has been dominated by institutional and political approaches, and they have remained more focused on national histories. Where historians of either Eastern or Southern Europe have addressed the transnational or transregional aspects of transition, this has mainly focused on the appeal of the West or its Atlanticist dimensions.

The authors consider the historical period of reforming the financial and taxation mechanisms of Soviet Russia and the USSR from 1917 to 1986. In 1985, M.S. Gorbachev came to power. He began reformation of the political system, the aims of which consisted in the process itself without any focus on a specific social and economic model for the state and society. Meanwhile, the epoch of the building of utopian communism in the USSR was over and in 1991, the USSR collapsed due to a number of fatal political mistakes made by Gorbachev and his associates, which led to a severe crisis. One of the most essential features of the reformed taxation system of the period is the fact of its being changed by the government to adapt it to the aims of the socioeconomic development of the peoples’ state of a new type, Soviet Russia and the USSR, through plan management of productive forces under conditions of state-owned means of production. It should be mentioned that the taxation system of Soviet Russia and the USSR guaranteed provision of financial and physical resources for the victory of the Red Army in the Civil War and in the war against the invaders. It also allowed the state to promptly industrialize the whole USSR, create the most advanced army in the world and win the Second World War, in the shortest time reconstruct economy and social sector destroyed by German occupiers and continue the accelerated socioeconomic development until the beginning of Gorbachev’s reformation. Thus, the above mentioned theoretical and practical aspects of the development of financial and taxation mechanisms of Soviet Russia and the USSR can be of practical use for scientists and practitioners not only in contemporary Russia but also in the other post-socialist countries when taking decisions of reforming financial and taxation systems.

The article identifies, interprets and compares the artistic images of «virgin lands workers» formed by the Soviet cinema, which is an important channel of the nation's historical memory and a means of communication of our time. The work gives a detailed description of the problem's historiography. A conclusion is made about the predominance of studies devoted to the social-economic, political and environmental consequences of the virgin lands development. At the same time, despite the growing interest of scientists in the social-cultural aspects of the virgin lands campaign in recent decades, there are very few works analyzing the daily life of virgin landers. The article uses various research methods: retrospective, comparative-historical, semiotic, and discourse analysis. In the course of the research, the author determines the features of virgin lands representation in mass culture as a special social-cultural space, shows the hard fate of virgin lands workers, their attitude to the system of values established in the post-war Soviet society. The main characters of the virgin lands epic represented in the cinematography are young people and «competent leaders», without whom it is impossible to imagine the success of major party projects. The attitude of the virgin lands explorers to the global project can be characterized as ambiguous and multi-layered: virgin land is seen both as an important agricultural project, allowing, under favorable circumstances, to solve the «eternal» grain problem, as an important social elevator for Soviet youth, and as a necessary stage of building communism. The study demonstrates both similarities and differences in the ideological and semantic concepts of the virgin lands filmography, and also reveals a certain transformation of directors' artistic ideas: from the propaganda and heroic message characteristic of 1950s films to the authors' desire to reveal the spiritual and moral potency of the campaign's heroes, characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s films.

The Polish People’s Republic is a matter of the past, but not entirely. Finally, nolens volens, the current version of our old statehood is its continuation, manifested in numerous formal solutions. This is in an evident manner a republican form of statehood and a democratic system. Similar to the Stalinist Constitution of 1952, it was called a people’s democracy, but from 1976 a socialist democracy as the effect of changes in the written Ius Supremum. In the political practice, after partial totalitarianism came authoritarianism. Before 1980, there were no changes in the institutional state power system. Theoretically, the first in this structure was the Sejm — the official emanation of the Volonté Générale. The collective head of the state was the State Council with a more republican identity than the contemporary president. The Council of Ministers actually has the same shape as before 1989, as well as the parliamentary cabinet system of government. In similar situation are: the Supreme Court, the Administrative Court, the Constitutional Court, the State Tribunal, the Ombudsman, and the Supreme Chamber of Control. Their identity and philosophy of action are similar to the socio-political reality from before the system transformation, mythologized in many aspects. This does not mean that it is fiction. Its result, according to the ancient nomenclature, was the transformation of socialist democracy into bourgeois people’s rule. Actually, we rather talk about the transition from “communism” or totalitarianism to liberal democracy. But Marxist-Leninist classics claimed that communism will be a post-state society without class opposites. Finally, in the Polish People’s Republic real socialism existed, with partial totalitarian character, replaced shortly after Stalin’s death by authoritarianism, which in the socio-economic and cultural spheres tolerates spontaneous manifestations of activity, without inspirations of the authorities, its culmination being in the time of the several-month-long “Carnival of Solidarity”. The Gdańsk Agreement we can understand as a social agreement, later transformed into the Round Table Agreements. After the continuation of these events it is possible to find on the constitutional ground in 1989, and then in 1997, when the new, formalized and complete Highest Law was created, as a formal recapitulation of political transformation. So we observe the mild transition of the Polish People’s Republic into the Third Polish Republic. The first one does not exist in the text of the actual Constitution, but it is impossible to not see a certain continuity. In the situation of the important difference between the two forms of our statehood — old and new — probably in the case of a system transformation there significant revolutionary accidents would have been unavoidable, but they have not happened. Parliamentary democracy was liberalized, which manifested in in the replacement of Gierek’s famous slogan of moral and political unity with the conviction that an official electoral struggle for power between parties is necessary. The second important change in the political sphere is the greater consideration of Montesquieu’s dogma concerning the division of state power. Other changes are less significant. Also, the republican democracy has maintained its fundamental identity, although the system of institutionalized rule had changed.

Who supports social policy in the developing world? Most of what we know about micro-level preferences for social policy comes from well-developed, wealthy countries of the OECD, where governments can credibly commit to policy enforcement and implementation. This dissertation explores preferences for social policy in post-communist countries, where weak constraints on the state challenge the welfare state. In doing so, it provides novel insights both into social policy debates in these countries and the coalitions which support (or oppose) social policy. I argue that support for social policy depends on how institutions shape the expectations of actors about the costs they pay into social policy programs versus future benefits. I draw on existing theories of political economy to propose four mechanisms -- misappropriation, contract enforcement, free-riding, and macro-economic risk -- that alter the distribution of winners and losers from social policy. Misappropriation stems from officials' ability to divert funding away from intended uses. While for most this imposes dead-weight costs on social policy, where institutions are poor. the politically well-connected can benefit from diverted funds to decrease social policy costs. The contract enforcement mechanism emerges due to the inability of weakly constrained states to enforce contracts. Predictions are similar to misappropriation, but actors also cannot trust other private actors with control of social policy. Free-riding emerges when bureaucrats are unwilling to expend effort to ensure tax compliance. Again, this imposes dead-weight costs on most, but garners support from tax evaders, who can free-ride. Finally, the macro-economic risk mechanism suggests that macro-economic volatility is heightened in settings with weak institutions, which increases both individual risk and support for social policy. The empirical portion of the dissertation tests the observable implications of each of these mechanisms. Chapter 2 provides a first-cut, cross-national test of part of the argument using micro-level data from a cross-national survey of 28 post-communist countries. I draw on work on informality in the post-communist world to identify individual characteristics associated with tax evasion to test the free-rider mechanism. Consistent with it, I show that those associated with evasion support social policy more where institutions are weaker. Chapter 3 posits that if the mechanisms I propose matter, actors will appeal to the logic of my theory during concrete reform debates. I test this using evidence from the 2001 pension reforms in Russia. I combine analysis of the legislative debates surrounding reform with in-depth content analysis of the Russian media, which draws on an original dataset of all mentions of reform in 352 Russian newspapers, journals, and trade magazines. I show that all four mechanisms were indeed major concerns. Chapter 4 tests the theory at the firm level, using a survey of 666 Russian firms to look at preferences where institutional quality is weak. I test whether firms that I predict support the welfare state in such settings -- those with political connections and a comparative advantage in hiding from the authorities -- actually do so. In addition to providing some support for the misappropriation and free-riding mechanisms, this chapter is a contribution in its own right: it is among the first to use surveys to study firms' preferences for social policy. Finally, chapter 5 uses a survey experiment conducted on 1600 respondents to attempt to understand the ceteris paribus effect of institutions on the average individual. Using a simple framing experiment, I provide three different treatment groups with information about bribery, tax evasion, and the extent to which private pension funds commit fraud to test the misappropriation, free-riding, and contract enforcement mechanisms, respectively. The chapter offers mixed evidence. The dissertation makes contributions to both the study of the welfare state and the political economy of institutions and investment. First, the dissertation explores preferences for social policy in the developing world and introduces institutional quality concerns to this literature. My work particularly focuses attention on the ways certain groups can abuse social policy to pass costs onto others, adding nuance to existing understandings of who benefits from social policy. Second, it advances our understanding of how institutional quality shapes economic decision making and provides evidence as to how different pathologies of poor institutions shape economic decisions.