Preface

Summary

This book has taken a number of years to finish and in retrospect, it is hard for me to recall when the whole project began. It goes back at least to my days at Cornell's Economics Department. At that stage, when I was doing my visiting lecture on communist-type economies, my insights were mostly straight out of a textbook, but the research that I was doing was drawing me away from the conventional thinking. I have continued my search for a fresh look at the system and, since it collapsed, have applied the same approach to the post communist transition. My book presents this alternative view through an in-depth examination of Poland's economy during 1970-1994 period. While at Cornell, I gained greatly from close cooperation with Jan Svejnar and Kathy Terrell, colleagues on a joint project about Poland's economy during Gierek's regin. I made another major step in my research along the same lines while on a fellowship at Stanford University. My efforts gained from encouragement and comments by Ellen Comisso and Laura Tyson, who published my research results in a book collection printed by the Cornell University Press. Invaluable has also been help from Paul Marer, with whom I have worked on a number of projects, including a study of the impact of foreign debt on Poland's economic growth after Gierek (this during my brief teaching appointment at Northwestern's Economics Department).