Journal Special Issue
Neglected Key Issues in the Transition Debate

Since the gradual introduction of market reforms in China in 1978 and their sudden, rapid and widespread adoption in Eastern and Central Europe and the former Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s, the transition has generated an intense debate on the factors and policies that can facilitate the transformation of ailing socialist economies into vibrant market democracies. The fervour of this debate should not come as a surprise: as repeatedly pointed out in the literature, never in history had the economic profession and the policy makers faced the task of developing without any significant historical precedent on which to rely a theory of transition and a viable strategy for the systemic transformation of a sizeable part of the world economy.