Jaroslav Vanek The Labor Managed Economy Essays Ithaca N Y And London Cornell Univ Press 1977

This title was first published in 2001. Spanning a quarter of a century, this collection makes conveniently accessible 14 of Yunker’s thorough and highly illuminating contributions to the literature on market socialism.

Table of contents

This book asks whether a modern, efficient economy can be rendered democratically accountable, and, if so, what strategic changes might be required to regulate the market- based interaction of economic agents. The contributors bring contemporary microeconomic theory to bear in an attempt to find a progressive replacement to traditional state socialism. Various approaches to the study of economic interaction are considered in an attempt to understand the relationship between power and efficiency in market economies.

Textbook giving theoretical economic analysis of workers cooperatives and enterprises under workers control - uses econometric models to examine membership, capital formation, the effects of wages and prices, efficiency, the implications of a monopoly position and reactions to market uncertainties; includes exercises and answers. Graphs and references.

3 edge, methods and theory. I turn now to some of my own reflections on this score. Some Reflections My first proposition is that if we are interested in analyzing the performance and dynamic properties of the world's economies, it is only at significant peril that comparative economists can overlook noneconomic or "political" factors. This is not to say that it is illegitimate to abstract from non-economic factors for particular purposes; rather, such abstraction should occur only with cogni zance of the influences being suppressed. I have argued elsewhere that the analytical compromise in suppressing noneconomic variables is greater for the study of planned than for market economies. [7] Borrowing from Polanyi [8], it is claimed that in market sys tems the economic sphere is disembedded from (separate and not subordinate to) the political, social and cultural spheres, while in planned systems the economic sphere is embedded in the noneconomic spheres. To be sure, market economies are strongly affected by political and cultural factors, but planned economies have and often exercise the potential to let political goals dominate in making production, allocational, or distributional choices. Indeed, it is difficult in practice to separate out what are political and what are economic decisions in planned systems.

Drawing on his background as an economist and a specialist on the Yugoslav system of workers' self-management, Janez Prasnikar analyzes an extraordinary amount of dispersed information on the experience with workers' participation in thirteen developing countries.