The Affinity Between Ownership Forms and Coordination Mechanisms: The Common Experience of Reform in Socialist Countries

The title of the session in which this paper was given, ‘The Theory of Markets in a Planned Economy’, suggests two alternative approaches. One is that of a normative theory — that is, the elaboration of a theoretical blueprint for an economy, relying upon both the plan and the market. Whatever might be the significance of such an approach, this paper takes as its basic themes the other approach, namely positive analysis. A reform process is under way in several socialist countries. The course of thought applied in the paper is based on the hypothesis that in all reform countries it is possible to identify certain common tendencies. Of course, each reforming country constitutes a unique case, and one must look hard to find suitable ways of discerning common patterns of reform in countries as diverse as Yugoslavia, Hungary, China, Poland and the USSR. One must accomplish another equally difficult task as well, that is the task of properly evaluating the cases of failed reform such as the one which was attempted in 1968 in Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, there exist many common lessons, and in this paper we will attempt to delineate some of them.