Syllabus
Course outline with dates:
Introduction: what is Comparative Economics about. How do we compare economies. Examples. (February 16th)
Dynamics of economic systems. Development of the concept of property rights. Traditional economic systems. Islamic economics. (February 23rd)
Market economy/economies - variety. Socialist alternatives: concepts, calculation debate. First summary. (March 2nd)
Development of applied alternative models. Soviet-styled model of central planning: functioning and problems. (March 9th)
Yugoslavian alternative: self-managed firms. Labour-managed firms: theory and performance. (March 16th)
Theoretical explanations of the problems of Soviet and Yugoslavian model. Soft budget constraints. Second summary. (March 23rd)
Transition back to market: ideas, implementation, early results. GDR as a special case. (March 30th)
Holidays (April 6th)
Focus on privatization: methods, effects on companies, implications for wealth distribution, elites. Midterm + third summary. (April 13th)
Chinese economic model: history (April 20th)
Current Chinese economic model? (April 27th)
Russian turbulent 1990s. Current Russian economic model. Fourth summary. (May 4th).
India, Vietnam, other interesting cases. (May 11th)
Annotation
The course will be taught in the hybrid mode, i.e. the lectures and seminar sessions will be taking place in room 314 (Thursdays, 9:30-10:50, 11:00-12:20) but they will be simultaneously streamed via the Zoom platform too. Zoom link will be sent to all students registered in the SIS.
More detailed information on this course are provided on Moodle.
Course objectives:
(i) Understand the basic features of different economic systems,
(ii) Understand different approaches in analyzing and comparing real economies,
(iii) Understand main concepts useful for explaining the troubles of centrally-planned economies.
(iv) Understand the change from central planning (and authoritarian regimes) to market economies (with liberal/illiberal democracies) in Central and East Europe.
(v) Understand the specific features of current state-capitalism like systems, with the focus on Russian and Chinese economies.
The aim of this course is to compare and contrast countries and regions on different stages of economic development and economic transition, using the new institutional approach. Technological development as the basic reason of economic growth and economic differences in developed countries is analyzed - using different approaches - in the broader economic and social framework, from inventions to innovations. Detailed information is on https://dl1.cuni.cz/course/view.php?id=453