The dramatic fall in output in eastern Europe in the 90s was a result of the institutional structure imposed by the state - taken here as exogenous - on the production process. Consider therefore an economic system where the state is promoting a policy of 'forced capital formation' to fund a technology which produces higher output. The drawback is that such a system becomes internally unstable: even though economic growth takes place in the short run, in the long run the economy moves into a transition path towards a stable lower income (unless the relationship between the political sector and the economy changes and the state withdraws from the capital formation process). As output loss reached the level of another Great Depression, pecularities of this phenomenon of East Europe can bring new insight into what is triggering great depressions.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by EconWPA in its series Macroeconomics with number
0510008.