The Perilous Road to the Market: The Political Economy of Reform in Russia, India and China

This volume examines the economic transformation of three of the largest countries in the world - Russia, China and India - and explores the very different strategies adopted by each. The author argues that the process of transformation is highly unpredictable, and traces the problems each country has faced to its economic history and the political system it inherited. Conventional analyses of economic transition are all based upon a single macro-economic model developed by the World Bank and IMF, dubbed the Washington censensus. The premise of the Washington consensus is that markets are a natural extension of man’s propensity to truck and barter , and that one has only to remove the state from the sphere of the economy for a market economy to emerge full-blown in a very short time.