Pages

 

János Kornai

0 comments
Harvard has an economist on their faculty who understands how the hardness or softness of budget constraints varies among institutional structures.

János Kornai is a Hungarian who, as I understand it, published his first article on economics in 1956. During the 1960s, he researched a planning methodology in parallel with the official Hungarian planning; the official planning was based on Leontief input-output analysis. Kornai's methodology consisted of sectorial planning, addressed by Linear Programming, and a "central problem" of allocating resources, based on a game-theoretical formulation (Kornai and Liptak 1965).

Among the Post Keynesian economists I read, though, I think some of Kornai's later work is more frequently cited. In this work (Kornai (1971 and 1970), Kornai and Martos (1973)), he compares and contrasts certain institutional characteristics of actually existing capitalism and socialism. If I understand correctly, Kornai found that he had to create a lot of terminology because his observations did not fit into economic theory as he found it. In particular, neoclassical price theory ignores the institutional detail and non-price signals Kornai thinks important. Frank Hahn thought well enough of this work to engage it.

Lately Kornai (1990 and 2000) has been writing about post-communist transition economies.

I would like to be more familar with Kornai's work than I am. I would have trouble sumarizing his major points more than above.

References
  • F. H. Hahn (1973). "The Winter of Our Discontent", Economica, New Series, V. 40, N. 159 (Aug.): 322-330
  • J. Kornai and T. Liptak (1965). "Two-Level Planning", Econometrica, V. 33, N. 1 (Jan.): 141-169
  • J. Kornai (1971). Anti-Equilibrium, Amsterdam: North Holland
  • J. Kornai and B. Martos (1973). "Autonomous Control of the Economic System", Econometrica, V. 41, N. 3 (May): 509-528
  • J. Kornai (1979). "Resource-Constrained versus Demand-Constrained Systems", Econometrica, V. 47, N. 4 (Jul.): 801-820
  • J. Kornai (1990). The Road to a Free Economy: Shifting from a Socialist System: The Example of Hungary, New York: W. W. Norton
  • J. Kornai (2000). "What the Change of System from Socialism to Capitalism Does and Does Not Mean", Journal of Economic Perspectives, V. 14, N. 1 (Winter): 27-42

0 comments:

Post a Comment

  • Greenspan's Cult of Personality... Review topics and articles of economics: Alan Greenspan was a legend in his time and there was no shortage of praise for him back then. For example, who can forget Bob Woodow's 2000 book Maestro: Greenspan's...
  • Yes Tyler, Low Interest Rates Matte... Tyler Cowen is wondering whether the Fed's low interest rates in the early-to-mid 2000s really were that important to the credit and housing boom of the early-to-mid...
  • The Eurozone Crisis: Deja Vu... Review topics and articles of economics: Randal Forsyth sees similarities between the current unfolding of the Eurozone crisis and that of the U.S. financial crisis a few years back:Just as the problem on this...
  • Charles Plosser and the Burden of F... The Economist's Free Exchange blog is shocked to hear this from Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia President Charles Plosser:"Since expectations play an important role...
  • Arnold Kling and Expected Inflation... Review topics and articles of economics: What do we know about expected inflation? According to Arnold Kling not much if we look to financial markets:I'm also not convinced that we can read expected inflation...
  • A Paper on Stabilizing Nominal Spen... Given the recent discussion on stabilizing nominal spending as a policy goal I found this article by Evan F. Koenig of the Dallas Fed to be interesting: The article...
  • Why The Low Interest Rates Mattered... Review topics and articles of economics: This is the second of two posts detailing why the Fed's low interest rate policies in the early-to-mid 2000s was one of the more important contributors to the credit and...
  • Why The Low Interest Rates Mattered... This is the first of a two-part follow up to my previous post, where I argued that the Fed's low interest rate policy was a key contributor to the credit and housing...
  • The Stance of Monetary Policy Via t... Review topics and articles of economics: There has been some interesting conversations on the stance of monetary policy in the past few days between Arnold Kling, Scott Sumner, and Josh Hendrickson. Part of...
  • Scott Sumner's New Best Friend:... Joseph Gagnon is calling for $6 trillion more in global monetary easing. This should not be too hard to implement since the Fed is a monetary superpower.Update: The...