Frieder Otto Wolf: Reflection on the Case Studies

1. What do I want (and not necessarily expect) from case studies?

They should help us to become aware of complexity and even excess – where reality goes beyond the effects of over-determined structures, showing us, how a specified, singular society evolves under the impact of strategic interventions (of neo-liberal policies which follow a general pattern, while varying it). In these cases, the case studies should exhibit, how the singular societies of Eastern Europe have evolved under More

Jan Toporowski: Eastern Europe: Post-Communist Assets in Crisis

During the 1980s, in the final years of communism, Eastern European economists and politicians were easily persuaded by the myth that removal of the petty restrictions on private business would allow private enterprise to flourish. The idea of a permanent state of capitalist dynamism is rooted in the notion that finance spontaneously backs industrial enterprise.                                                                                                         Many economists assume, at least in their abstract theories More

 

Tina Schivatcheva: The Great Leap Westward – China and the Land grabs in Ukraine and Bulgaria

The recent global rise of food prices has predicated the explosion of land-grab practices at a global geo-economic scale.  In Eastern Europe, although the post-socialist ‘great transformation’ entailed the commodification of the land, unsettled land ownership and undeveloped land market offered, at best, only a short-lived and tenuous protection from land-grabs.  The global financial crisis impacted particularly strongly the resource-dependent, export-oriented economies of Bulgaria and Ukraine. More