An Introduction to the Symposium

This paper presents an introduction to the EEJ symposium. It initially focuses on the problems that have arisen in the wake of the ascendancy of the neo-liberal model into the realm of international Policymaking. Liberalization, privatization, and stabilization have been introduced with little regard to the stages, history, organizational capabilities and institutional settings of individual developing and transitional economies. Although liberalization engenders shifts in political and economic power, the architects of reform have failed to concern themselves with the potential implications to social structures of countries. The introduction focuses on three issues that concatenate the papers in the symposium: problems with property rights, theoretical and practical problems with the stabilization model, and the weaknesses embedded in the theory underlying financial liberalization. In the conclusions, they briefly point the way to alternatives to orthodox reform.