Economic and Political Reform in Developing Countries
ISBN: 9781349134601
Platform/Publisher: SpringerLink / Palgrave Macmillan UK
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: unlimited; Download: unlimited
Subjects: Palgrave Economics & Finance Collection;

This volume explores the interactions between economic and political reform in developing countries and eastern Europe. Over the past decade there have been significant moves both towards economic reform - essentially involving a greater role for the market and a lesser role for the state - and political reform, with important steps taken towards democratic forms of government. In some areas political change preceded economic reform (as in much of eastern Europe), while elsewhere economic and political reform have gone hand in hand, often as a result of external pressure. The essays cover a wide range of experience of economic and political reforms, from which some general lessons emerge. The most important one is that political and economic reforms interact in complex ways, with political reform often acting to slow down or even reverse economic reform. Secondly, it is shown that the state has an important role to play in guiding reform and preventing market excesses.

Frances Stewart is Emeritus Professor of Development Economics, Emeritus Fellow of Somerville College and Director of the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE), University of Oxford, UK. Among many publications, she is the co-author of UNICEF's influential study Adjustment with a Human Face and author of Horizontal Inequalities and Conflict. She has directed a number of major research programmes including several financed by the UK Government's Department for International Development and has served as Chair of the United Nations Committee on Development Policy.

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