Since economic calculation requires the prior existence of property rights and market prices, the difficulty of efficiently privatizing resources is unavoidably greater in centrally planned economies. Privatization efforts will be more successful if they’re implemented in a bottom-up fashion in sectors of a transitioning economy with more access to market prices that are subject to international trade and competition. However, because the calculation problem extends to the creation of property rights, we should seriously temper aspirations to plan development.
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Tegan Truitt is a doctoral student in the Department of Economics at George Mason University.
Scott Andrew Burns is an associate professor of economics at Southeastern Louisiana University in the Department of Management and Business Administration.
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