Analytically, privatization and pluralization may be treated as separate economic and political phenomena, but in the actual conditions of a post-Communist society they are integrally related to the development of a middle-class society that was absent due to ‘deprivatization’ in a one-party state. The creation of a society of plural interests and private enterprise represents a shift from Sovietization to Europeanization. However, the process is extremely difficult, for there are many paradoxes in the logic of privatization. In addition, issues of ownership – past as well as future – are major political battlefields. Political strategies of privatization include a grand coalition; a new state-party; Latin-Americanization; creating a broad entrepreneurial class and/or a European working class; and a wide coalition. These complexities are examined with particular reference to the experience of contemporary Hungary.

Professional economists have for a long time had significant roles as advisers to policy makers. In recent years they have gone well beyond this in many countries and have come to occupy the highest positions in government. While their technical knowledge is an important reason for their influx into governments, their acquisition of the highest positions of authority, we contend, is to an important degree a ceremonial display. The symbolic aspect of the appointment of high-level economist-politicians is as significant as any specific stock of knowledge they bring to political life and is a part of an emerging transnational political culture in which economists occupy a sacerdotal role.

As the debate throughout the eighties has concluded, the efforts of governments to intervene at the firm level has largely been disappointing. Using two examples drawn from the British experience, Rover and Inmos, this paper offers an analysis as to why the Government has encountered difficulties when it has sought to intervene in a strategic fashion. Essentially, public policy makers lack adequate mechanisms to intervene effectively in technology-based companies. Locked out of the knowledge base of the firm, inappropriate financial control is imposed which reinforces the ‘outsider’ status of the Government. Having addressed the limitations of strategic intervention, the paper, drawing on the comparative experience of other countries, then goes on to address how this policy boundary might be pushed back in the long term.

This article examines the institutional characteristics of market and centrally planned economies and their impact on the environment. It argues that while the planned economies are utilising market mechanisms in environmental protection, their market counterparts are facing more and more environmental problems that require governmental intervention. Using the latest statistical information, the records of sulphur dioxide emission under market and planning over the past twenty years are compared. The findings show that while planned economies generated more pollution due to energy inefficiency, they were nevertheless quite effective in reducing pollution under centralised coordination. This is particularly true at the initial stage of pollution control. Although the industrialised market economies were capable of diverting resources into pollution control, they were equally capable of causing environmental disruption, especially at their early stages of industrialisation. Finally, it is argued that environmental protection in post-socialist societies is likely to experience a downturn in the near future. This is due to the decreasing role of government coordination, the lack of a legal system, and the difficulty of developing a well-functioning market.