Approches de la transition et nature des économies post-socialistes

摘要

The transition of ex-socialist economies has been a particularly rich field of research for testing the soundness and limits of the presuppositions, hypotheses and normative statements underlying various currents of thought in economics. Following an overall view of major approaches to transition issues used over the past decade, the nature of post-socialist economies is brought under consideration. For more than ten years now, many studies devoted to these issues have taken capitalism to be the immediate, inevitable prospect for ex-socialist economies. But there is a logical and practical possibility for economies of an unprecedented type to emerge that cannot be reduced to either socialism or capitalism. A grid for specifying contemporary economic systems is proposed and then applied to former socialist economies in an attempt to decipher their nature. Although some of them have attained capitalism, others cannot however be said to be capitalistic. They constitute sui generis economic systems, qualitatively distinct from both capitalism and socialism.