“A fundamental difficulty with the government is that there is no owner of the residual. There is no one who directly benefits from delivering a product cheaply, or from making a new or higher quality product.”
^Almost true. A dictator (or family, eg Singapore) could in principle earn the residual to efficient government.
The adjacent and more pressing problem is that the people who do have control and sometimes residual rights cannot trade them. Through trade we get prices and prices help us make efficient decisions.
" Electricity consumption (a weak indicator anyway, as there was little incentive to economize on electricity) fell by considerably less than GDP fell. Household consumption measures – like ownership of automobiles and other consumer durables, or living space, increased after the fall."
Most likely in the initial post-soviet period car ownership increased while people got poorer.
It is very easy to explain. In the USSR very few people could afford cars. When iron curtain fell, people imported used cars from the West for relatively low prices. Cars that normally would be destined to scrapyard could be given as a donation to poor Russians. Think in this way, if 1% of Russians had a car and it increased to 2%, it doesn't mean life for the rest of 98% got better (I don't know the exact numbers but you get the point).
You weren't even born yet. I was there. IT WAS BAD! The experience of the Soviet bloc countries varied widely. The worst cases, though, saw hyperinflation, widespread unemployment, and even war (in the Caucasus and Tajikistan). The transition to a market economy was necessary if those countries were to rise much beyond their mid 1980s standards of living, but it could have been handled much better with far lower costs of transition. The drawn out and wrenching transition in Russia, which took a whole decade, prepared the way for Vladimir Putin.
"So too have the harms from privatization, exaggerated in the West by those reflexively opposed to markets."
A lot of the criticism of the privatisation is specifically about the privatisation inside Russia specifically and as you say that privatisation was done in a corrupt manner and had a negative effect on the economy.
This is important because it's another case of USA being a very bad influence when messing with another country affair's.
No, their method is different. The papers I cite are comparing the change in various dependent variables for a particular firm after privatizing, not simply regressing countrywide policies on countrywide outcomes.
“A fundamental difficulty with the government is that there is no owner of the residual. There is no one who directly benefits from delivering a product cheaply, or from making a new or higher quality product.”
^Almost true. A dictator (or family, eg Singapore) could in principle earn the residual to efficient government.
The adjacent and more pressing problem is that the people who do have control and sometimes residual rights cannot trade them. Through trade we get prices and prices help us make efficient decisions.
" Electricity consumption (a weak indicator anyway, as there was little incentive to economize on electricity) fell by considerably less than GDP fell. Household consumption measures – like ownership of automobiles and other consumer durables, or living space, increased after the fall."
Some numbers here would be nice.
Most likely in the initial post-soviet period car ownership increased while people got poorer.
It is very easy to explain. In the USSR very few people could afford cars. When iron curtain fell, people imported used cars from the West for relatively low prices. Cars that normally would be destined to scrapyard could be given as a donation to poor Russians. Think in this way, if 1% of Russians had a car and it increased to 2%, it doesn't mean life for the rest of 98% got better (I don't know the exact numbers but you get the point).
You weren't even born yet. I was there. IT WAS BAD! The experience of the Soviet bloc countries varied widely. The worst cases, though, saw hyperinflation, widespread unemployment, and even war (in the Caucasus and Tajikistan). The transition to a market economy was necessary if those countries were to rise much beyond their mid 1980s standards of living, but it could have been handled much better with far lower costs of transition. The drawn out and wrenching transition in Russia, which took a whole decade, prepared the way for Vladimir Putin.
"So too have the harms from privatization, exaggerated in the West by those reflexively opposed to markets."
A lot of the criticism of the privatisation is specifically about the privatisation inside Russia specifically and as you say that privatisation was done in a corrupt manner and had a negative effect on the economy.
This is important because it's another case of USA being a very bad influence when messing with another country affair's.
But it was an overall good to have those Russian industries privately owned and priced, rather than public.
No, their method is different. The papers I cite are comparing the change in various dependent variables for a particular firm after privatizing, not simply regressing countrywide policies on countrywide outcomes.