Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 June 2011
Since the collapse of communism the states of postcommunist Europe and Asia have defined for themselves, and have had defined for them, two primary tasks: the construction of viable market economies and the establishment of working institutions of representative democracy. The variation in political and economic outcomes in the postcommunist space makes it, without question, the most diverse “region” in the world. What explains the variation? All of the big winners of postcommunism share the trait of being geographically close to the former border of the noncommunist world. Even controlling for cultural differences, historical legacies, and paths of extrication, the spatial effect remains consistent and strong across the universe of postcommunist cases. This suggests the spatially dependent nature of the diffusion of norms, resources, and institutions that are necessary to the construction of political democracies and market economies in the postcommunist era. The authors develop and adduce evidence for the spatial dependence hypothesis, test it against rival hypotheses, and illustrate the relationships at work through three theoretically important case studies.
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15 Fish (fn. 6).
16 The measure of property rights is based on the following criteria: freedom from government influence over the judicial system, commercial code defining contracts, sanctioning of foreign arbitration
17 One alternative to this coding would simply be to substitute “distance from Brussels” as the independent variable. This choice is justifiable on conceptual grounds, since joining the EU and NATO remain important goals for most postcommunist states. Substituting Brussels does not alter the statistical results substantively. Jeffrey Sachs has recently turned to a distance variable in his explanation of post-communist outcomes. Sachs, “Geography and Economic Transition” (Manuscript, Harvard University, Center for International Development, November 1997); idem, “Eastern Europe Reforms: Why the Outcomes Differed So Sharply,” Boston Globe, September 19,1999.
18 Analysis producing the results in Tables 2–4 performed on Intercooled Stata ver. 6.0 using the xtreg function. This command estimates cross-sectional time-series regression models. We employed a population-averaged model to produce a generalized estimating equation that weights the countries by their available data. Standard errors are semirobust and adjusted for clustering around countries. OLS assumptions are relaxed for pooled data, in other words, so that multiple observations for each country are not assumed to be independent of one another.
19 Because the factors from which the bureaucratic rectitude score is constituted are also components of the overall Economic Freedom score, we could not include the bureaucratic rectitude measure as an explanation for Economic Freedom. Kitschelt's corruption score correlates with our bureaucratic rectitude score at .8669, so it is an adequate substitute.
20 Kitschelt's bureaucratic rectitude scores are measured for a single year, rendering a time-series model irrelevant.
21 Even if the coding of Croatia is changed to reflect recent political developments, the relationship between distance and outcomes is significantly diluted by Belarus's and Mongolia's outlier status.
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29 Scores are assigned in such a manner as to provide for the most even distribution of cases across the 1–5 categories.
30 The lag between openness measures (1991–96) and the dependent variables of political level (1993–98) and economic reform (1995–99) is intentional. Our expectation is that interaction will influence political and economic behavior over time. Although there may be some immediate effects, we expect that a period of three to four years is most likely to capture the learning and implementation processes that would result from new information.
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38 In a similar vein Vladimir Popov has recently argued that policy choices cannot account for variation in the recessions in the postcommunist world between 1990 and 1993. Popov, “Explaining the Magnitude of Transformational Recession” (Manuscript, Department of Economics, Queens University, Canada, 1999).
39 The logic of EU enlargement, one based mostly on a standard of geographical contiguity and proximity, is a topic that remains mostly unexplored, due principally to the cryptopolitical nature of most discussions of the matter among policymakers. Such an explanation, of course, represents a departure from a purely structuralist approach to diffusion, in that EU and NATO decisions to admit particular countries is itself an element of spatial context, and these decisions were influenced by a whole range of considerations, not only strategic but also cultural, of where EU members consider Europe's boundaries properly to lie and who should be a member of “Europe.” If culture is to reenter the picture in our spatial diffusion analysis, we suspect that this is the proper place for it.
40 Of course, some countries in this group have restructured their polities and economies more than others. Hungary and Poland, for example, have arguably restructured more than the Czech Republic and Slovenia. In fact, an alternative construction of this figure as a scatter plot could have shown the gradations of variation in location and policy. We have chosen the two-by-two for clarity of presentation.
41 Between 1989 and 1998 Hungary received the largest share of FDI by far in the formerly communist world. In second and third place came Poland and the Czech Republic. Coolidge, Jacqueline, “The Art of Attracting Foreign Direct Investment in Transition Economies,” Transition 10, no. 5 (1999), 5Google Scholar.
42 Jacoby, Wade, “Priest and Penitent: The European Union as a Force in the Domestic Politics of Eastern Europe,” East European Constitutional Review 8, no. 1 (1999), 62–67Google Scholar. In March 1998 the EU formalized what was already widely known, that there would be two tiers of accession candidates. The Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Estonia, and Slovenia are in the first group for accession, and Bulgaria, Slovakia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Romania are in the second group. Since then, EU officials have alternated between an admit-each-when-it-is-ready and an admit-them-in-groups approach.
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44 Jacoby (fn. 42). In Hungary's June 1999 parliamentary session, for example, 180 laws were passed, 152 of which were not subject to any debate because they were part of the acquis communautaire, see Magyar Nemzet, June 19,1999. We thank Andrew Janos for providing us with this information.
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52 Christopher Walker, “Slovakia: Return to Europe Questionable,” RFE/RL Weekly Report, September 25,1998, http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/1998/09/RRU.980925133407.html.
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56 See especially the annual reports of the National Bank of Slovakia, an institution that retained a remarkable degree of autonomy under Meciar; http://www.nbs.sk/INDEXA.HTM. It is now apparent that part of the secret of Meciar's economic success was connected with huge, debt-driven infrastructure programs undertaken in 1996 and 1997.
57 “Slovak NGOs had their natural partners abroad, and they exchanged skills, technical advice, and moral encouragement with them”; Butora, Meseznikov, and Butorova (fn. 54), 19.
58 Fish (fn. 53), 50. Fish maintains that “the very birth and persistence of Meciarism show that geography is not destiny” but concedes that location may well have mattered in the longer run.
59 In an attempt to take advantage of an opposition that was fragmented into a number of competing parties, he did change the electoral rules just before the 1998 elections so that it would have been impossible for the opposition to win had they not coalesced into a single party.
60 Jolyon Naegele, “Slovakia: Democratic Opposition Has Chance to Change Policies,” RFE/RL Weekly Report, September 28,1998, http://www.rferl.org/nca/features/1998/09/RRU.980928134909.html.
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66 By 1999, for example, the son-in-law of President Akaev was reported to have gained control of almost all of the energy, transport, communications, and alcohol industries, as well as its airline. See Moskovski Komsomolets, December 9,1999, 3.
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70 Ibid. In 1998, for example, Uzbekistan's president Karimov criticized Kyrgyzstan's dreams of Westernizing its economy. “Kyrgyzstan,” Karimov admonished the Kyrygz leadership, “is tied more closely to the IMF, which is your ‘Daddy’ and supervises everything.” “O druzhbe, bez kotoroi ne prozhit',” Slovo Kyrgyzstana, December 2,1998, 2, cited in Huskey.
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