Los estados ex soviéticos obtuvieron mejores resultados con las reformas de choque que con las graduales

HUMAN PROGRESS

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, a key argument in favor of a gradual approach to reforms was that rapid reforms would cause a great deal of social pain. In reality, rapid reformers experienced shorter recessions and recovered much earlier than gradual reformers. As Figure 1 shows, GDP per capita growth among rapid reformers, such as Central Europe and Baltic states, was much faster than among countries that opted for gradual reform. The latter group of countries included most non-Baltic countries of the former Soviet Union.

Rapid reformers also received much more foreign direct investment, which has stimulated their growth and employment. Importantly, as I will explain below, rapid reformers also ended up with lower rates of income inequality and lower poverty rates. Indeed, the UN HDI, which is a much broader measure of human well-being, points to the same conclusion: the social costs of transition in rapidly reforming countries were lower than those in other ex-communist states.

Figure 1: GDP per Capita by Country Group, 1990–2013 (in 2011 U.S. Dollars Adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity)

(Note: CE = Central European; SEE = Southeast European; FSUREF = Former Soviet Union, gradual reforms; FSULAG = Former Soviet Union, lagged reforms.)

Moreover, the advocates of gradualism argued that institutional reform, such as the development of the rule of law, should precede market liberalization. A stronger legal system, they argued, would increase the effectiveness of economic reforms.

In a strict sense, it is impossible to disprove this argument, for no post-communist country followed that sequence of events. In all ex-communist countries, institutional development lagged considerably behind economic reforms. Waiting for institutional development before implementing economic reforms, therefore, could easily have become a prescription for no reforms at all.

However, after 25 years, rapid reformers ended up with better institutions than gradual reformers. In fact, the fastest progress on institutions was made by the very same countries that undertook rapid economic liberalization (see Figure 2). This outcome is consistent with the hypothesis that political elites who were committed to economic liberalization were also committed to subsequent institutional development.

Conversely, political elites, who advocated gradual reforms, often did so in order to extract maximum rents from the economy. One extreme consequence of gradualism was the formation of oligarchic classes. Rich capitalists have, of course, arisen in all transition economies, but their concentration and degree of political influence appears to be far higher in slowly reforming countries, in particular the large economies of the former USSR.

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