Republican Economic Reforms

Extract

Republican reforms are an interesting topic, especially for those of us who have despaired of the prospect for any real market reforms by the central government. The last year has provided a ray of hope. The governments in the Baltics, Armenia, the RSFSR, and later Kazakhstan, all announced plans for privatization and the creation of a market system that extended well beyond those of the central government. Whereas central initiatives—there now appear to be far too many to name—over the last two years appeared to be halting and indecisive, the vitality of the republic sovereignty campaigns suggests that economic transformation has much better prospects at the grass-roots. We all know some of the evidence that exists for this: the fact that, in the Baltics for example, the rate of formation of cooperatives has been much higher, almost twice as high as the average for the rest of the Soviet Union; that in Estonia, the percentage of joint ventures far outweighs the share of Estonia's contribution to the Soviet GNP, and so on. We know that the RSFSR went ahead and adopted the 500-day plan, or at least announced that it was doing so, even after the Shatalin plan was rejected at the national level.