Preface

To help mark the 60th anniversary of the publication of Comparative Economic Studies, the journal's Editor, Nauro Campos, invited us to contribute an essay on the journal's evolution over the past 10 years, during which we served as co-editors. Upon some reflection, we though that such an essay should cover a longer period so as to put the last 10 years into a historical context and that it should also examine the relationship of the journal to the field of comparative economics over these years. To share the task, more or less as we shared our editorial responsibilities, we decided that Brada would cover the early years of the evolution of Comparative Economic Studies and that Wachtel would cover in greater detail the journal's past 10 years. Thus, Brada is responsible for most of "The History and Evolution of Comparative Economic Studies" section and Wachtel for most of "Comparative Economic Studies in the Post-Transition Era" section. Since our views of the field of comparative economics and of the role that Comparative Economic Studies has played in its evolution are personal, the essay is written from a first-person perspective of the Section's author.

The History and Evolution of Comparative Economic Studies

When Nauro Campos, the Editor of Comparative Economic Studies (CES), invited us to write an article about the role that CES has played in the evolution of the field of comparative economics to help mark 60 years of publication of CES, I had a mixed reaction. On the one hand, I was eager to do so, given my long association with the journal and with the Association for Comparative Economic Studies (ACES), its sponsor. On the other hand, I was daunted by the difficulty of capturing a half century of publishing activity and interpreting its meaning for the field of comparative economics. To prepare myself for the task, I reread a number of past issues of the journal, both old and recent. I came away with the conviction that CES faithfully captured the intellectual currents of our field, both the fruitful ones and those that ended up in the cul de sac of intellectual history, and helped move comparative economics forward by remaining open to different schools of thought, to analyses of emerging problems and to a broad range of contributors. Because of this, CES has been, and continues to be, central to the field of comparative economics. In what follows, I present a chronology both of the earlier years of the journal and of its impact on the evolution of comparative economics.

The Beginnings

Comparative Economic Studies had two ancestors, each founded by a separate professional association. The Association for the Study of Soviet-Type Economies (ASTE) was founded in December 1958, but in November of that year, it had published the first issue of the Bulletin of the Association for the Study of Soviet-Type Economies under the editorship of John Hardt. (1) The ASTE Bulletin was a rather casual affair, consisting of 18-20 letter-sized typed and hectographed pages stapled together.

The ASTE Bulletin's content reflected the main concerns of the field at the time, which were the analysis and understanding of central planning and of the economic performance of the USSR. Access to the Soviet and East European countries and their economic research centers was limited, as was the availability of economic data and the economic literature produced in those countries. Thus, there were numerous short articles in the ASTE Bulletin describing and critiquing publications from the region that could be of use to ASTE members. Other articles chronicled the authors' experiences in these countries and described the main centers of economic research that they had visited. (2) Other recurring themes were the measurement of Soviet aggregate output and of ways of converting data on Net Material Product into the more familiar GDP. (3)

The other forebear of Comparative Economic Studies was the Proceedings of the Association for Comparative Economics, which was sponsored by the Association for Comparative Economics and published at Northern Illinois University under the direction of Jack Skeels. The Proceedings carried longer articles, mainly those presented at the Association's annual meetings. Many of these, such as Chapman (1971), dealt with Soviet-type economies, but others, such as Frank (1971), dealt with explicit comparisons of counties outside the Soviet and centrally planned economy orbit.

These differences between the two associations, one explicitly focused on the Soviet bloc and the centrally planned economy while the other more open to comparisons between many types of economic systems, have been, and to some extent continues to be, an intellectual conundrum for our field. ASTE had a very focused, area-studies-type approach to the Soviet-type economy. Most of the leading centers of the study of Soviet-type economies, such as the Russian Research Center at Harvard University, were intentionally organized on a multidisciplinary area-studies basis. One is hard put to think of equally well-funded centers or eminent scholars of that era dedicated to explicit comparisons of all types of economic systems. Most of the researches reported in the ASTE Bulletin and in other economics journals, such as the comparisons of the level or growth of US and Soviet GDP or of the two countries' defense expenditures, were, in fact, not comparative or only implicitly so. This tension between a focus on a specific economic system, the socialist or planned economy, which, for lack of a better term, I will call Sovietology, and a broader vision of comparative systems as a field of economics did not go unnoticed at the time, but, as I hope to show, continued to simmer beneath the surface before being thrown into sharp relief by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc. Thus, even now, while CES and other major journals in comparative economics do carry numerous articles analyzing or comparing the workings of differing market economies, a certain affinity for, and emphasis on, the post-Soviet sphere and on China persist, making it difficult to clearly identify the focus and the boundaries of the field and to develop a methodology for comparing economic systems. (4)

Despite these intellectual tensions, in the early 1970s, the Association for the Study of Soviet-Type Economies merged with the Association for Comparative Economics to form the Association for Comparative Economic Studies (ACES). The new Association continued the ASTE Bulletin under a new name, the ACES Bulletin (with the subtitle "Formerly the ASTE Bulletin"). The ACES Bulletin first made its appearance in 1972, with John Hardt continuing as Editor. In physical appearance, the new journal was exactly the same as the ASTE Bulletin, but it did carry both articles devoted exclusively to the Soviet-type economy (e.g., Campbell 1972) as well as articles that compared market-type economies (e.g., Kasun 1972-73).

The ACES Bulletin Matures

The following year saw major changes in the ACES Bulletin. Production was moved from Northern Illinois University to the International Development Research Center at Indiana University, and John Campbell of Indiana University joined John Hardt as Co-editor. The physical appearance of the Bulletin changed from stapled letter-sized pages to a journal-size booklet that was now professionally bound rather than held together by a staple. The first issue, Volume XV, Number 1, organized by Paul Marer of Indiana University, appeared in the Spring of 1973, and it contained over 100 pages of research material, all related to the recently signed US-USSR trade agreement and to East-West trade. The articles by Thomas Wolf (1973) and Carl McMillan (1973) can arguably be seen as the first full-blown research papers appearing in the Bulletin, (5) The Bulletin published a second issue that year, with an additional 100 pages or so of research articles. In subsequent years, it was published at least three times a year, and, in 1976, the ACES Bulletin was published four times, testimony to the volume of research in comparative economics and the ability of the co-editors, John Hardt and Robert Campbell, to attract good material.

It was at this seeming apogee of its success that the ACES Bulletin faced a major crisis. The Association had, for some years, been planning the publication of a new journal, the Journal of Comparative Economics (JCE), which was to be edited by J. Michael Montias of Yale University and published by Academic Press. There were several factors leading up to that decision. One was that the Bulletin was seen as too "casual" in content and in physical appearance to provide sufficient prestige, recognition and tenure worthiness for contributors. Another was that the study of Soviet-type economies was becoming more theoretically and econometrically sophisticated; such material was unacceptable to area-oriented multidisciplinary journals like Soviet Studies or the Slavic Review. Finally, it was becoming clear that not all of the more technically sophisticated research on comparative economics and the Soviet-type economies produced by comparative economists could be accommodated by existing general-interest economics journals.

In discussing the launch of the new journal at the ACES Membership Meeting in Atlantic City in December 1976, many members of the Association expressed the belief that the appearance of the Journal of Comparative Economics made the ACES Bulletin superfluous and suggested that the Bulletin be discontinued. Franklyn Holzman, the Association's President at the time, proposed to let the market decide the fate of the Bulletin. If an editor could be found, and if the Bulletin could continue to attract suitable material, the Association would continue to publish it. If these conditions could not be met, then it would be discontinued. By happenstance rather than through any formal selection process, I was appointed Editor starting in 1977 and continued through 1986. (6)

Thus, ACES, a relatively small professional association, found itself sponsoring two scholarly journals. Nevertheless, the two journals were seen as having quite dilferent editorial objectives in two ways. First, the J CE was to publish work that was more methodologically sophisticated, either in terms of econometric methods or in terms of formal theorizing, while the Bulletin would publish material that was more descriptive in its treatment of Soviet-bloc economies and that relied more on authors' expert judgment and deep knowledge of these economies than on formal modeling.

The second difference was that Mike Montias' vision for the Journal of Comparative Economics was explicitly comparative in that he articulated a clear interest in the comparison of economic systems, real or theoretical, past or present, and of their components, especially of their institutions. Despite the fact that most of the members of the Association were brought up in the intellectual framework of Sovietology, Montias did achieve this editorial objective to a greater extent than may have been expected at the outset, as the excellent article by Murrell (2011) demonstrates. The selection of Montias as the first editor of JCE was incredibly fortuitous, both for the Journal and for the field of comparative economics. In part this was due to the fact that he was equally adept at Sovietology and comparative economics. He was fluent in Russian and spoke many of the East European languages. He wrote "Sovietological" monographs on Czechoslovak planning and on Romanian economic development, making full use of the economic literature published in those countries' languages. At the same time, his book on economic systems (Montias 1976) systematized what one meant by an economic system and how one might go about analyzing it. With a foot firmly planted in each camp, he was able to reconcile the different interests and methodologies of Sovietology and comparative economics. (7) The Bulletin thus was pushed in a more "Sovietological" direction both by the ability of JCE to attract explicitly comparative work and by the fact that many of the members of the Association continued to write relatively descriptive articles about the socialist economies that tended to fall outside the JCE's scope of interest.

The Bulletin's production was moved from the International Development Research Center at Indiana University to Arizona State University, and the Association thus came to control not only the editorial policies but also the publishing and distribution of the Bulletin,8 Publication continued on a quarterly schedule, with the annual page count growing over 500 pages. Moreover, the Bulletin began to receive more submissions dealing with the Chinese economy, reflecting the growing expansion of ACES members' geographic interests to that country and also to the countries of Eastern Europe, where reforms, and, in the case of Yugoslavia, the evolution of the system of labor management, presented examples of planning and social ownership that differed in significant ways from the Soviet case.

Twenty-Five Years of the ACES Bulletin and the State of the Field

In 1983 the Bulletin was 25 years old. To mark this milestone, I commissioned articles evaluating 25 years of research and publication in comparative economics, all of which were published in 1983 (Volume XXV). Authors were dissuaded from producing traditional survey articles, but rather asked to provide a more personal and eclectic view of their topics and also to look to the likely future direction of comparative economics research on their assigned topic. Table 1 lists the articles published.

As Table 1 reveals, most of the articles touched on studies of the Soviet and East European economies. Ellman (1983) and Thornton (1983) covered the main themes in the study of the Soviet economy: central planning and the measurement of economic aggregates. The authors noted that considerable progress had been made in understanding how central planning worked and what the size of the Soviet economy was. (9) New issues, however, had arisen. The study of central planning, for example, was moving from questions of how plans were constructed, how they could be made workable, etc., toward new questions such as the effect of various reforms in planning and management of the economy. While there was growing consensus on how to measure the size of the Soviet economy, disagreements emerged over its rates of growth. These new research interests were driven to a large extent by the emergence of a sort of stagflation characterized by growing excess demand for consumer goods and slowing growth of aggregate output in the Soviet bloc, a topic that was to attract many contributions to the Bulletin up to the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The study of the East European economies offered, according to Ed Hewett (1983), a valuable alternative to the study of the Soviet economy. East Europe offered better data, more open access to researchers and, most important, a greater number of inter-country differences and in-country changes in the economic system, offering the possibility of answering questions that could not be answered by study of the Soviet economy alone.

These improved circumstances for ACES members called for better ways of thinking about differences in economic systems that was more sophisticated than the socialist-capitalist dichotomy. Moreover, the emergence of the system of self-management in Yugoslavia offered up a new economic system. As Milenkovitch (1983) described it, the analytical tractability of the microeconomics of the labor-managed firm and the labor-managed firm's similarity to the standard textbook microeconomic model of the capitalist firm led to the development of an extensive literature on the microeconomics of labor-managed firms and to efforts to create a macroeconomic model of the labor-managed economy as well. In retrospect, the emphasis on the microeconomics of the labor-managed firm was probably not the most fruitful way of understanding the Yugoslav economy and the problems it would encounter.

There were two chapters on agriculture, in part because there was much greater variety in the organization and reform of agriculture in Eastern Europe. Lynn Turgeon (1983) provided a relatively upbeat evaluation of agricultural reforms in Eastern Europe, in part based on extensive field observation. Robert Stuart (1983) painted a more negative picture of Soviet agricultural performance and also touched on the need for a better conceptual framework for determining which systemic peculiarities of the Soviet economy were responsible for the most glaring of these shortcomings, thus echoing the call of other contributors for a better "comparative economics" to guide empirical research.

Perhaps most salient to a discussion of the evolution of the field of comparative economics and the role that the Bulletin played in it were the articles by Peter Wiles (1983) and David Conn (1983). Juxtaposing the two articles reveals the continuing tensions between comparative economics and "Sovietology." One source of tension was the distinction between traditional Sovietological methodology and the incursion of greater theoretical and econometric sophistication into the field of comparative economics. The other was the one already identified, the gap between the research agendas of Sovietology and of comparative economics. Wiles praised "Sovietological economics" because it had "kept to the old ways" when economists "visited factories, trade unions, and farms" as a central part of their investigations. (10) Yes, he conceded, we had taken up econometrics "of a special simple, demandless kind," some production functions, index numbers and input-output methods. The methodology that Wiles praised was, indeed, the methodology that underlay most of the material that had been published in the Bulletin in the preceding 25 years and that had achieved the understanding of the Soviet and East European economies chronicled in the other survey articles.

Nevertheless, as Conn's paper showed, Wiles was fighting a rearguard action. Formal theorizing and increasing econometric sophistication were overtaking the field of comparative economics. (11) Conn pointed to two ways in which economic systems theory was evolving. One was the work of scholars, many not comparative economists, on incentives, information and coordination in economic organizations. The second was in the development of a grand theory of economic systems, or, better put, a rigorous description of what we might mean by an economic system.

Montias (1976) and Neuberger and Duffy (1976) described the components of an economic system and how these components might interact to produce outcomes. Montias formally defined and stressed institutions, policies and economic agents (firms, households, etc.) as fundamental building blocks whose activities were coordinated by the information that the system generated and by its structure of incentives and decision-making authority. (12) Neuberger and Duffy also stressed the role of decision-making authority, information and motivation of economic units. Kornai (1971) took a somewhat different approach to link systems, capitalist and socialist, to outcomes that were characterized by a surplus or a shortage of goods, respectively. However, it is difficult not to agree with Conn that these general systems models, while focusing attention on important building blocks of an economic system and the connections among them, had "gotten ahead of us" in that testing of such broad comparative economics theories lagged far behind theorizing about economic systems and that narrower question had to be addressed from the standpoint of both theory and empirics. (13)

From ACES Bulletin to Comparative Economic Studies

In 1985, the Bulletin's name was changed again. Given the claims on journal space by research articles, space devoted to more casual functions such as the reprint clearing house where members could share their recent publications, professional announcements, etc., was sharply reduced The Association concluded that the "bulletin" function had largely been superseded and that a better representation of the journal's function could be provided by a new name, Comparative Economic Studies. Despite the name change, CES continued to publish both traditional "Sovietological" articles, now covering the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Cuba and China, as well as some econometrically oriented articles, including models of centrally planned economies and of socialist business cycles. It was also around this time that CES changed from its typed format to the typesetting of published articles, giving the journal a more professional appearance.

When I succeeded Mike Montias as Editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics in 1987, William Moskoff replaced me as the Editor of CES and served until 1992. This was, of course, an exciting time for comparative economics, and Moskoff proactively organized special issues on key topics, including on the economy of the GDR, on Soviet economic reforms and on changes in socialist agriculture. These special issues, as well as the regular articles published, were of great value to readers of CES, giving them authoritative and up-to-date information on the many events taking place in the (former) Soviet bloc. Bill was followed by Susan Linz, who served from 1992 to 1996. She continued to publish valuable descriptive material pertaining to developments in Eastern Europe and Russia as well as more theory- and econometrics-based articles. She also published articles on the so-called gradualism versus shock therapy debate, a theme that continued in CES for some time.

Robert Stuart then served a term as editor from 1996 to 2002. He made important changes to the operation of CES, instituting electronic submission of material and creating a Web page for the journal. During this time, Comparative Economic Studies continued to evolve. There were more articles dealing with China and with systems theory, as well as with other regions of the world that had fallen outside the scope of the "Soviet-type" countries that had been focus of attention of the ASTE and ACES Bulletin.

In 2002, Jeffrey Miller took over as Editor, with Ali Kutan and Istvan Szekely as Associate Editors. The larger editorial team reflected the growing scope of the journal as well as the larger volume of material being submitted. Szekely's appointment also reflected another important change in the field. The transition in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union brought with it not only a whole range of new issues, but also the opening up of a more intense "East-West" academic dialog between economists, and Szekely was the first East European to play a major role in Comparative Economic Studies' functioning. Moreover, during his tenure as Associate Editor, he was employed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Before the transition, international agencies such as the IMF had paid scant attention to the countries that were the focus of Comparative Economic Studies' interests. Now, the IMF and the World Bank were intensely involved in the region, both institutions requiring assistance in providing policy advice and generating a wealth of new research on the region, and some of this material found its way to the pages of Comparative Economic Studies, as, for example, in the symposium published in Winter 2002 entitled "IMF and the Ruble Zone". Other symposia were published as well, many dealing with the transition process. To reflect the importance of policyoriented work related to the transition and the role played in the transition by many ACES members, Miller introduced a special section of CES called "Practitioner's Corner" where policy makers and advisors could discuss important policy issues in a rigorous but open and non-confrontational way.

Commercializing Comparative Economic Studies

The other, and equally important, change that occurred around this time was the emergence of the internet as major force in the dissemination of knowledge. Journals were increasingly available through the internet, and counting the number of "hits" on journal articles available through the Web became an established way of evaluating the contributions that a journal was making to the dissemination of knowledge. Because the Association lacked the resources to provide Comparative Economic Studies with an effective Web presence, the Association decided to establish a partnership with a reputable publisher of scholarly journals who would take over the production and distribution of Comparative Economic Studies and provide it with an effective web presence. In 2003, the first issue of Comparative Economic Studies to be published for the Association by Palgrave Macmillan appeared, as did the journal's new Web site. The appearance of the journal was revamped to make it more appealing to readers, and content expanded as well, with as many as 700 pages of material being published each year.

Comparative Economics in Transition

The period from 1989 into the early 2000s was a turbulent one for our field. The economic and political collapse of the Soviet-bloc thrust Sovietology and comparative economics into the foreground of academic and policy debates. A widespread assumption was that those Western scholars who had a deep knowledge of centrally planned economies would be best placed to provide policy advice to the countries transitioning to market economies, leading to a flowering of popular and professional interest in the Sovietological side of comparative economics. Sovietologists (and specialists on other Soviet bloc countries) only partly fulfilled this expectation that they would be central to the transition process. Certainly, understanding the institutions of the planned economy and the lasting legacies they left on the behavior of economic agents by the former system was valuable in formulating policy advice. Thus, emphasis on institution building and on adapting existing institutions to new ends was stressed by many who considered themselves comparative economists. However, economists from other fields often offered advice from a different perspective, stressing the need for fiscal stabilization and the rapid transition to the market-based allocation of resources. Perhaps both sides were correct, although in retrospect it seems evident that whether stressing the creation of new institutions or macroeconomic stabilization, advice was modeled more on what advisers saw as the end state of transition rather than on what policies would best serve the process of transitioning from socialism to capitalism itself. (14) Thus, it is fortunate that transition for many countries proved to be a shorter process than had been expected.

After the heady days of writing about and assisting the transition process, to many observers, comparative economics seemingly faced its demise. Economists both within and outside the field viewed the disappearance of planned economies and the end of transition as putting an end to traditional comparative economics (Djankov et al. 2003) and requiring a new comparative economics, one based on comparisons of institutions in different capitalist economies. As I hope this essay has suggested, the demise of the Soviet-bloc certainly severely diminished, but did not entirely eliminate, the interest in the Sovietological approach to comparative economics, but, as I have argued elsewhere (Brada 2009), comparative economics was much more than Sovietology, and the demise of the Soviet bloc freed non-Sovietological comparative economics to seek its full potential as a field of economics.

Comparative Economic Studies in the Post-Transition Era

When Joe Brada and I took over as co-editors, the question of what direction CES should take loomed large. The journal had already undergone several transformations from its origins as an organizational newsletter for the small core of specialists in Soviet economics. As the field grew, the journal emerged in the mid-1970s as an academic journal that specialized in Soviet-type (centrally planned) economies. Though often removed from the interests of most mainstream economists, Soviet and comparative economics was a strong and active field for at least two reasons. First is the political struggle with powers behind the Iron Curtain-dominated global international relations, and second, it was not always obvious that planning could not function as an alternative to markets. The name of the journal was changed from ACES Bulletin to Comparative Economic Studies in 1985, just a few years before the field was thrown into turmoil by a rapid sequence of events that began in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall and culminated with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Most observers thought that the ensuing transition would differ from anything ever seen before. (15) Not surprisingly the pages of CES in the 1990s and the 2000s were dominated by analyses of the transition experience as already described. CES became a journal largely devoted to transition.

In the early 1990s, many observers thought that transition, the creation of marketbased economies, would take generations, and, to the surprise of many, it did not. By the mid-2000s, the differences between transition economies and other emerging market economies were rapidly disappearing. Although many transition economies were unstable and struggling, the problems that they faced were similar to those found elsewhere. In retrospect, the differences between developing economies with extensive government intervention and direction of market outcomes and ones where Communist ideas--government control of all resources and the absence of market mechanisms to determine prices--prevailed were overemphasized. Many economies outside of the Soviet bloc were highly controlled statist economies and many Communist countries had some market mechanisms or market-oriented reforms. The emphasis in comparative economics shifted from comparative systems to comparative institutions (Murrell 2008).

Thus, CES was to undergo another transformation as Joe and I took over as coeditors in 2008. On the one hand, we believed that there was considerable value to the traditional comparative economics methodologies that had sustained the field for the previous 50 years. In fact, one of us (Brada 2009) felt that limiting the field to comparing institutions of capitalist economies was intellectually constricting. On the other hand, transition clearly obliterated many differences between planned and market-oriented economies, as I emphasized in Olofsgard, Wachtel and Becker (2018). As a consequence, we adopted an eclectic approach to the intellectual direction of the journal in the decade of our editorship. The emphasis on formerly planned economies and the transition experience continued while comparisons with and among developing and emerging market economies shared the journal's pages.

CES was not only challenged by these changes in the field of comparative economics but also by changes in the world of academic journals. The entry of commercial publishers into academic journal publishing in economics led to a large increase in the number of journals and increased competition for high-quality submissions.

We began our term as co-editors with both challenges in front of us. We addressed the first set of challenges by setting out a broad definition of our areas of interest that included the problems faced by market economies as well as formerly planned economies in transition. We addressed the challenges of a changing world of publication by proactively seeking articles and particularly symposia that addressed policy issues and developments. We felt that there was a serious need for academic surveys and policy analysis in addition to the formal research articles that are the bread and butter of academic publication.

At the start of our term, in 2008 we published a series of 50th anniversary survey articles, listed in Table 2, that differed in tone considerably from those published in the 25th anniversary issues. The 25th anniversary essays were forward looking. Given the seeming demise of the Sovietological aspect of comparative economics, the 50th anniversary essays were backward looking, intended to explain what the Sovietological approach had yielded. Authors were asked to review the contributions of past work in comparative economics to the field of economics at large.

Interestingly, two articles, by Jefferson (2008) and by Li and Putterman (2008) dealt with comparative economics work on China, and they both stressed the contribution that research on China had made to the field of economics and the challenges that Chinese economic performance posed for conventional economic thinking about economic systems. Jefferson's wide-ranging essay highlights the challenge posed by China's economic success for both traditional western economics, which he identified with the so-called Washington Consensus, and for the new institutional economics, which stresses the centrality of good institutions for economic prosperity. He noted that China is lacking in the rule of law, in the protection of private property and in restraining corruption. Moreover, its financial system is weak, and there is considerable government involvement in the economy. All of these are seen by the traditional literature on institutions as barriers to economic success. In his essay, Jefferson resolves this seeming paradox and shows how the Chinese experience can enrich our understanding of the interplay of institutions and other system components in determining economic performance.

The second essay on China, Li and Puttererman (2008), surveys the findings of studies on the productivity effects on Chinese firms that resulted from various market-oriented reforms and from the emergence of firms not directly owned by the state. These studies are valuable for two reasons. The first is that these studies are methodologically more sophisticated and based on richer data than were the studies of enterprises responses to market-oriented reforms in communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Second, the Chinese reforms involved not only changes in the objectives, incentives and business opportunities faced by firms, but they also involved significant changes in ownership structure. The authors conclude that, while private firms were generally more efficient than state-owned enterprises, both types of firms experienced gains in productivity and that, in the latter stages of the reforms, the productivity gap between the two types of firms narrowed. These findings suggest that market-oriented reforms can improve economic performance in a centrally planned economy. The paradox is that the paper by Ellman, discussed below, suggests just the opposite conclusion, namely that market-oriented reforms in the USSR did not improve economic performance and may have, in fact, hampered it.

Estrin and Uvalic (2008) reviewed work on Yugoslavia and labor management. They concluded that, although the theoretical literature on the comparative statics of the labor-managed firm was interesting and added to mainstream economics' understanding of worker cooperatives in market economies, the theory missed too much of Yugoslav reality to be of much predictive value, perhaps thus underlining the value of the traditional "Sovietological" approach espoused by Wiles and others 25 years earlier.

Finally, Ellman (2009) argued that the study of the Soviet economy "was not just an anthropological study of an ultimately failed economic system" (p. 15). Rather, he argued, Sovietology forced mainstream economists to question the universality of "Western" economics and to explain whether their economic theories and models were adequate to the study of very different economic systems such as that of the USSR.

Moreover, he identified several areas where the unique features of the Soviet economy forced researchers to develop new approaches to economic analysis. One of those areas was in the measurement of growth. The different results that the use of Paasche and Lespeyres indexes would yield in growth estimates were not a great problem if the structure of output changed only gradually. However, it was soon realized that in an economy such as that of the Soviet Union, where many new and high-priced products were being introduced, which index one used made a very significant difference in the estimate of economic growth. This was the so-called Gerschenkron effect.

The disappointing results of most of the economic reforms introduced in the USSR also taught us that introducing market elements into a system of central planning could lead to worse rather than better economic results and that understanding the institutions into which new elements were to be introduced was critical for successful reform. Sovietologists also developed concepts such as the ratchet effect, the shortage economy, and the role and measurement of the informal sector. In Ellman's view, Sovietology did more than describe and measure the Soviet economy; it also posed questions and developed concepts that otherwise would not have been addressed by mainstream economics.

The retrospective provided by these papers thus showed that the Sovietological approach had considerable descriptive and analytical power. Moreover, the need to study systems that differed greatly from capitalist systems forced Sovietologists to develop new models and approached that were valuable contributions to mainstream economics.

In 2002, I arranged for the publication in CES of a symposium of papers from the 7th Dubrovnik Economic Conference (DEC) that I edited with Boris Vujcic who is now the Governor of the Croatian National Bank. Thus, a connection between CES and the annual economic conference of the Croatian National Bank began before we became editors. I became a member of the Scientific Committee of the Dubrovnik Conference and the DEC symposium has been a regular annual feature of CES since the 12th DEC symposium appeared in September 2007. That tradition continues under the editorship of Nauro Campos; a symposium of papers from the 24th DEC will be published in 2019.

The topics of Dubrovnik Conference papers tend to emphasize issues that are relevant to a central bank, such as monetary policy, exchange rates, banking sector stability and capital flows. The symposia combined high-quality policy-oriented work on East Europe with broader concerns about the European and global economies. There are many papers on the transition experience and more recently on the EU's new member states and on the Euro area.

In addition to the Dubrovnik Conferences, we published several symposia on finance and banking as well as on labor issues in the USA and Europe. We tried to make the journal an outlet for important policy-oriented work that would not otherwise find a home. In September 2011, we published a symposium edited by Michael Spence and Roberto Zagha on "Restoring Inclusive Growth in Advanced Economies: A conversation with Economists and Policy Makers from the G20." Four years later, the September 2015 issue was a symposium on monetary policy and central banking in Latin America. The seven case studies in the issue explain how monetary policy is conducted in the region and show how the central banks sought to maintain financial stability and control inflation. In December 2017, we published papers from the CASE 25th Anniversary Symposium on the Future of Europe which addressed issues in both old and new Europe.

Several additional symposia came from papers presented at various conferences of ACES and other international organizations in comparative economics. The December 2014 issue consisted of papers from the Pacific Rim Economic Conference (edited by Joe) and an additional symposium of papers on young people and the labor market in Europe (edited by Joe, Enrico Marelli and Marcello Signorelli).

On two occasions we cooperated with the Revue d'economie financiere to present articles from symposia that they published in French (although in some instances the original pieces were written in English). In September 2013, we published articles from their symposium on New American Finance and in March 2018 from their symposium on Finance and Growth. These informative surveys otherwise would not have been available in English.

We also invited the Presidents of ACES to prepare their Presidential speeches for publication. Not everyone was able to do so but we did publish the addresses by John P. Bonin (December 2010), Peter Murrell (December 2011), Pekka Sutela (December 2013), Hartmut Lehmann (March 2015), Michael Alexeev (December 2016). Two additional addresses had appeared before we took over as editors: Barry Ickes (September 2005) and Marcus Noland (June 2006).

Table 3 lists the most downloaded papers published in CES. The list is somewhat biased as the download counts begin only in 2007, so papers published at that time have an advantage over more recent papers and over earlier papers in terms of downloads. Nevertheless, the list is informative in that it shows the broadening of the scope of CES's content as well as the continued emphasis on the former Soviet Bloc. In general, the contents of CES in its most recent decade reflected the rethinking of comparative economics. There was as much emphasis on the problems of market economies as on transition and the performance of formerly planned economies.

RePec (http://citec.repec.Org/s/2017/palcompes.html) lists eight recent Comparative Economic Studies papers with more than 40 citations. (16) These articles are shown in Table 4 starting with the most cited piece. It is interesting to note that only half of the articles address transition issues while the others focus on broader emerging market problems. These articles, largely published in the 2000s, reflect the emphasis of research at that time. It will be interesting to see which later articles accumulate citations in the future.

ACES also instituted the Bergson Prize, named after Abram Bergson, a pioneer of comparative economics. The prize is awarded biannually to the paper judged by the Association to be the best published in the preceding 2 years. Table 5 reports the winning papers. The list is noteworthy not only for the quality of the papers, but also for the variety of topics and regions covered.

Conclusion

Looking through the issues of the decade 2008-2017 that we edited reveals a journal that is quite a bit different from its earlier incarnations. Although the interest in traditional comparative economics (comparisons to formerly planned economies and a focus on the region) continues, the pages of the journal are filled with discussions of contemporary policy issues that affect economies of all types--from inflation targeting to labor market behavior. Moreover, our focus on invited papers and symposia has led to a journal that is informative, educational, policy-oriented and relevant in a way that a journal solely devoted to contributed research papers cannot be. CES today is both eclectic and impactful.

Although we have not resolved the issue of what comparative economics ought to be, it is amply evident that there are many scholars who consider themselves as comparative economists and perhaps the message for us is that comparative economics as a field is whatever its self-identified practitioners decide it is and whatever areas of research interest them. In this sense, CES has been, and will continue to be, a viable and vibrant intellectual enterprise.

References

Brada, J.C. 2009. The New Comparative Economics versus the Old: Less Is More but Is It Enough? The European Journal of Comparative Economics 6(1): 3-15.

Campbell, R. 1972. A Shortcut Method for Estimating Soviet GDP. The ACES Bulletin XIV(2): 31-34.

Chapman, J.G. (1971) Labor mobility and labor allocation in the USSR. Proceedings of the Association for Comparative Economics. 1-27.

Conn, D. 1983. Comparative Economic Systems Theory: Progress and Prospects. The ACES Bulletin XXV(2): 61-80.

Djankov, E.L., R. Laporta, F. Lopez-de-Silanes, and A. Shleifer. 2003. The New Comparative Economics. Journal of Comparative Economics 31(4): 595-619.

Eddie, S., and A. Wright. 1969. A Summer of Research and Language Study in Central and Eastern Europe, 1968. The ASTE Bulletin XI(1): 6-15.

Ellman, M. 1983. Changing Views on Central Economic Planning: 1958-1983. The ACES Bulletin XXV(1): 11-34.

Ellman, M. 2009. What Did the Study of the Soviet Economy Contribute to Mainstream Economics? Comparative Economic Studies 51(1): 1-19.

Estrin, S., and M. Uvalic. 2008. From Illyria towards Capitalism: Did Labour-Management Theory Teach Us Anything About Yugoslavia and Transition in Its Successor States? Comparative Economic Studies 50(4): 663-696.

Frank, Jr., C.F. 1971. Causes and Effects of Migration in Africa. Proceedings of the Association for Comparative Economics. 1-21.

Gerschenkron, A. 1950. A Neglected Source of Economic Information on Soviet Russia. American Slavic and East European Review 9(1): 1-19.

Grossman, G. 1969. A Key to Articles Published in Translation. In Problems of Economics, Vols. I-X. The ASTE Bulletin XI(2): 17-26.

Havrylyshyn, O., and R. van Rooden. 2003. Institutions Matter in Transition, But So Do Policies. Comparative Economic Studies 45(1): 2-24.

Hewett, E A. 1978: The Structure of Economic Systems by J. M. Montias (Book Review). The ACES Bulletin XX(3-4): 101-105.

Hewett, E.A. 1983. Research on East European Economies: The Last Quarter Century. The ACES Bulletin XXV(2): 1-21.

Jefferson, G.H. 2008. How Has China's Economic Emergence Contributed to the Field of Economics? Comparative Economic Studies 50(2): 167-209.

Kornai, J. 1971. Anti-equilibrium: On Economic Systems Theory and the Tasks of Research. AmsterdamNorth Holland.

Kasun, J.R. 1972-73. A Comparison of Unemployment, Inflation, the Money Supply and Wages in Eight Countries. The ACES Bulletin XIV(3): 11-18.

Koopmans, T.C., and J.M. Montias. 1971. On the Description and Comparison of Economic Systems. In Scientific Papers of Tjalling C Koopmans, vol. 2, ed. T.C. Koopmans, 29-80. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Li, W., and L. Putterman. 2008. Reforming China's SOEs: An Overview. Comparative Economic Studies 50(3): 353-380.

McMillan, C.H. 1973. Factor Proportions and the Structure of Soviet Foreign Trade. The ACES Bulletin XV 1:57-82.

Milenkovitch, D.D. 1983. Self Management and Thirty Years of Yugoslav Experience. The ACES Bulletin XXV(3): 1-26.

Montias, J.M. 1976. The Structure of Economic Systems. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Murrell, P. 2008. Institutions and Firms in Transition Economies. In Handbook of New Institutional Economics, ed. C. Menard and M.M. Shirley. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer.

Murrell, P. 2011. The Way We Were: Reflections on the Comparative History of Comparative Economics. Comparative Economic Studies 53(4): 489-505.

Neuberger, E., and W. Duffy. 1976. Comparative Economic Systems: A Decision-Making Approach. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.

Olofsgard, A., P. Wachtel, and C.M. Becker. 2018. The Economics of Transition Literature. Economics of Transition 26(4): 827-840.

Pryor, F. 1983. An Econometric Shoal Warning for Comparative Economists. The ACES Bulletin XXV(3): 71-73.

Simai, M. 1978. Hungary in East European Economies Post-Helsinki: A Review Article ACES Bulletin XX(3-4): 65-79.

Stuart, R.C. 1983. Russian and Soviet Agriculture: The Western Perspective. The ACES Bulletin XXVI3V 43-52.

Thornton, J. 1983. Twenty-Five Years of Soviet National Income Accounting: From Adjusted Factor Cost to Ultra-Adjusted Factor Cost. The ACES Bulletin XXV(3): 53-67.

Treml, V.G. 1971. Key to English Translations of Soviet Mathematical-Economic Papers The ASTE Bulletin XIII(2): 7-14.

Turgeon, L. 1983. A Quarter Century of Non-Soviet East European Agriculture. The ACES Bulletin XXV(3): 27-41.

Wiles, P. 1983. Methodology. In Praise of Ourselves. The ACES Bulletin XXV(l): 1-10.

Wolf, T.A. 1973. Effects of Granting Most Favored Nation Treatment to Imports from Eastern EuropeThe Polish Experience. The ACES Bulletin XV(1): 23-42.

Wolf, T.A. 1983. East-West Trade: Economic Interests, Systemic Interaction and Political Rivalry The ACES Bulletin XXV(2): 23-59.

(1) At the time Hardt was Editor of the ASTE Bulletin, he was employed by the Research Analysis Corporation and affiliated with the Institute for Sino Soviet Studies at George Washington University. He subsequently joined the US Congressional Research Service and continued and greatly expanded the publication program on the analysis of the Soviet economy for the Joint Economic Committee (JEC) of the United States Congress. These JEC compendia, popularly known as "The Green Books" because of their green covers, compiled analytical papers by leading specialists on the Soviet economy. Hardt selected the contributors, edited the submitted papers and expanded the publication program to include compendia on Eastern Europe and on China on a rotating 3-year basis. These compendia served as invaluable and authoritative resources for the study of these economies.

One of these compendia was the genesis of the first publication of an article in the ACES Bulletin by an "official" researcher from the Soviet bloc, when Mihaly Simai, head of the Hungarian Institute for World Economy, wrote a survey article on one of the compendia on Eastern Europe (Simai 1978).

(2) Eddie and Wright (1969) is a good example of such an article, and it clearly shows the limited access that members of ASTE, and Western scholars in general, had to the "Soviet-type" economies. There were also language barriers that the ASTE Bulletin tried to address, as for example in Grossman (1969) or Treml (1971).

(3) The measurement of Soviet aggregate output and of Soviet defense expenditures was of considerable interest to policy makers as well as to academics and also something of a point of disagreement between the latter and government analysts, especially those from the CIA.

(4) It may be that Sovietology did not seem a sufficiently scientific name for the research agenda being pursued at the time and during the years that followed, and comparative economics was seen as a more dignified name, comparable to development economics, labor economics, monetary economics, etc. In fairness, it may also be that, because very little was known about the Soviet economic system while the market economy was thought to be well understood, any information about the workings of the Soviettype economy could then easily be compared to the capitalist market economy.

(5) Despite this "great leap forward" for the Bulletin, the Editors were cautions, writing in their preface to this issue that the "... new format of the BULLETIN (to be continued for this year at least) provides more space than we have had in the past and we hope that this collection will elicit further contributions....".

(6) At the end of his remarks about the two journals, Holzman said something to the effect that anyone interested in editing the Bulletin should talk to him at the end of the Membership Meeting. With no intention of applying for the position but wanting to say hello to my former teacher, I walked up Frank, who looked up from his notes and said "What? Brada, you want to be the Editor of the Bulletin?" Completely nonplussed, I was too tongue-tied to decline.

(7) In addition to his pioneering contributions to comparative economics, Montias also made perhaps even greater contributions to the field of art history. He taught himself Dutch and how to read old Dutch handwriting and undertook archival research in Holland on Vermeer and his contemporaries. He published several books on the subject, and his research fundamentally altered the field of art history and our understanding of Vermeer. He received numerous prizes and awards for his work, and his book on Vermeer provided valuable information for the book and, later, the film, Girl with a Pearl Earring.

(8) The Bulletin was sent to ACES members for free, but subscriptions by libraries and other institutions formed a large part of the Association's income for many years. Digital copies of the journal from 1977 on are available at http://web.a.ebscohost.com.ezproxyl.lib.asu.edu/ehost/search/advan ced?vid=4&sid=15c3922c-077e-4238-bab9-a54da57a8d70%40sessionmgr4009. Previous issues are available only in hard copy, either at major research libraries or from the Association for Comparative Economic Studies archives.

(9) Although the measurement of aggregate output and its growth remained controversial, as many of the survey articles mention.

(10) Wiles' suggestion that Sovietologists should spent much time visiting Soviet factories and farms would have seemed rather strange in the early years of the Bulletin's existence, which was a time when access to the Soviet Union was so circumscribed that Gerschenkron (1950), for lack of any better sources of information, sought to learn how Soviet farms and enterprises worked by reading Soviet-era novels. Yet, Turgeon's article on East European agriculture suggests that his many visits to East European farms were of considerable value in understanding developments in East Europe's agrarian sector.

(11) The Bulletin had already carried its first article on econometric methodology (Pryor 1983). The theme of the article, pertaining to cross-country comparisons, will be familiar to those who work with panel

(12) A condensed version of Montias' framework can be found in Koopmans and Montias (1971).

(13) Indeed, as Hewett (1978) argued, these grand theories were, perhaps, not empirically testable at all.

(14) Another shortcoming of the advice showered on the transition countries was that advisers were largely interested in grand schemes, whether for institutional change or for stabilization. The details of policy were, to a large extent, ignored. A paper by Havrylyshyn and van Rooden (2003) makes this point rather provocatively through its title, "Institutions Matter in Transition, But So Do Policies".

(15) See ray discussion in Olofsgard, Wachtel and Becker (2018).

(16) Springer citations provide a slightly different list: https://citations.springer.com/search7query =comparative%20economic%20studies&zeroCitationsShown=false&start = l&searchfiel d=all&sort=rank&year=&journals=&books=&authors=&content.

https://doi.org/10.1057/s41294-018-0078-0

Josef C. Brada [1,2] * Paul Wachtel [3] (iD)

Published online: 29 October 2018

60th Anniversary Commissioned Article.

[mail] Paul Wachtel

pwachtel@stern.nyu.edu

[1] Arizona State University, Tempe AZ, USA

[2] CERGE-Economic Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Charles University Prague Czech Republic '

[3] New York University, Stern School of Business, New York, NY, USA

Table 1 25th anniversary survey articles

Author                 Tide

David Conn             Comparative Economic Systems Theory:
                       Progress and Prospects

Michael Ellman         Changing Views on Central Economic
                       Planning: 1958-83

Ed Hewett              Research on East Europe: The Last
                       Quarter Century

Deborah Milenkovitch   Self-management and Thirty Years of
                       Yugoslav Experience

Robert Stuart          Russian and Soviet Agriculture: The
                       Western Perspective

Judith Thornton        Twenty-Five Years of Soviet National
                       Income Accounting: From Adjusted Factor
                       Cost to Ultra-Adjusted Factor Cost

Lynn Turgeon           A Quarter Century of Non-Soviet East
                       European Agriculture

Peter Wiles            Methodology: In Praise of Ourselves

Thomas Wolf            East-West Trade: Economic Interests,
                       Systemic Interaction and Political
                       Rivalry

Table 2 50th anniversary survey articles

Author                          Issue

Gary H. Jefferson               50(2) June 2008

Weiye Li and Louis Putterman    50(3) September 2008
Saul Estrin and Milica Uvalic   50(4) December 2008

Michael Ellman                  51(1) March 2009

Author                          Title

Gary H. Jefferson               How Has China's Economic Emergence
                                Contributed to the Field of Economics
Weiye Li and Louis Putterman    Reforming China's SOEs: An Overview
Saul Estrin and Milica Uvalic   From Illyria towards Capitalism: Did
                                Labour-Management Theory Teach
                                Us Anything About Yugoslavia and
                                Transition to Its Successor States?
Michael Ellman                  What Did the Study of the Soviet
                                Economy Contribute to Mainstream
                                Economics

Table 3 Most downloaded articles from Comparative Economic Studies

Author(s)                       Title and year of publication

Jonathan Williams and Angel     The Search for Value: Cross-border
Liao                            Bank M&A in Emerging Markets (2008)

David Grigorian and Vlad        Determinants of Commercial Bank
Manole                          Performance in Transition: An
                                Application of Data Envelopment
                                Analysis (2007)

Martin C Spechler               The Handbook of Economic Sociology
                                (2007)

Hongdong Guo, Robert W Jolly    Contract Farming in China:
and Jianhua Zhu                 Perspectives of Farm Households and
                                Agribusiness Firms (2007)

Marc Dollinger                  The Oxford Handbook of
                                Entrepreneurship (2008)

Bruno Merlevede, Koen Schoors   Russia from Bust to Boom and Back:
and Bas van Aarle               Oil Price, Dutch Disease and
                                Stabilisation Fund (2009)

El-hadj Bah and Josef Brada     Total Factor Productivity Growth,
                                Structural Change and Convergence
                                in the New Members of the European
                                Union (2009)

Alberto Bagnai                  Introduction: The Euro: Manage It
                                or Leave It! (2013)

Gael Raballand                  Determinants of the Negative Impact
                                of Being Landlocked on Trade: An
                                Empirical Investigation Through the
                                Central Asian Case (2007)

Weiye Li and Louis Putterman    Reforming China's SOEs: An Overview
                                (2008)

Mohsen Bahmani-Oskooee, Ali     The S-Curve in Emerging Markets
Kutan and Artatrana Ratha       (2008)

Graham Bird and Thomas D        IMF Conditionality, Implementation
Willett                         and the New Political Economy of
                                Ownership (2007)

Sumon Bhaumik and Suchismita    Impact of Derivatives Trading on
Bose                            Emerging Stock Markets: Some
                                Evidence from India (2009)

Gary Jefferson                  How Has China's Economic Emergence
                                Contributed to the Field of
                                Economics? (2008)

Andrea Boltho and Wendy         EMU's Problems: Asymmetric Shocks or
Carlin                          Asymmetric Behavior? (2013)

Table 4 Most cited articles from Comparative Economic Studies

Bank Regulations are Changing: For Better or Worse? (2008). Ross
Levine, Ross, Gerard Caprio and James Barth. 50(4), pp. 537-563

Determinants of Commercial Bank Performance in Transition: An
Application of Data Envelopment Analysis. (2006). Vlad Manole and
David Grigorian. 48(3), pp. 497-522

Shock Therapy Versus Gradualism: The End Of The Debate (Explaining
The Magnitude Of Transformational Recession). (2000). Vladimir
Popov, 42(1), pp. 1-57

Output Costs of Currency and Balance of Payments Crises in Emerging
Markets. (2002). lian Noy and Michael Hutchison. 44(2), pp. 27-44

Efficiency of Banks in Croatia: A DEA Approach. (2002). Boris
Vujcic and Igor Jemric 44(2) pp 169-193

Labor Market Flexibility and Unemployment: New Empirical Evidence
of Static and Dynamic Effects. (2012). Dvide Furceri, Lorenzo
Bemal-Verdugo and Dominique Guillaume. 54(2), pp. 251-273

Ownership Structure and Enterprise Restructuring in Six Newly
Independent States. (1999). Simeon Djankov. 41(1), pp. 75-95

Institutions Matter in Transition, But So Do Policies. (2003). Oleh
Havrylyshyn and Ron van Rooden 45(1), pp. 2-24

Table 5 Winners of the Bergson Prize for the best paper published
in Comparative Economic Studies

2007 and 2008: Andrey Timofeev, "Market-Based Fiscal Discipline
Under Evolving Decentralisation: The Case of Russian Regions"

2009 and 2010: Yelena Kalyuzhnova, Ali M. Kutan and Taner Yigit,
"Corruption and Economic Development in Energy-rich Economies"

2011 and 2012: John S. Earle and Scott Gehlbach, "Did
Post-communist Privatization Increase Mortality?"

2013 and 2014: Rajeev K. Goel, Jelena Budak, Edo Rajh,
"Bureaucratic Monopoly and the Nature and Timing of Bribes:
Evidence from Croatian Data"

2015 and 2016: Zhang Jun and Zhu Tian, "Reestimating China's
Underestimated Consumption"