| Using legal documents, publicly available business information, state generated statistics, unique survey data, and case studies in over forty firms in Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, this dissertation attempts to understand: (1) What are the most important ways agents "make capitalism" in Eastern Europe? By what methods and means has state owned property been transformed, and new firms created, over the last eight years or so? (2) Has a capitalist economy developed? If so, what kind of capitalist economy is it? The dissertation finds that most property is created via a number of "strategies of transition" whereby former socialist managers, but also dissident intellectuals and members of the political elite, use various resources--most importantly networks established in the socialist period--to privatize state assets or create new firms.; The dissertation also finds that the result of this process of enterprise transformation, when aggregated across the economy, is the dramatic rise of private firms operating on competitive markets under fairly tight budget constraints--"capitalism has emerged" to a fairly significant extent. However, this is not a unitary process, and the dissertation details significant types of economic activity that are distinguishable from the types of endeavors usually associated with capitalistic or market oriented behavior. |
