Since the early 1980s China has witnessed a rapid increase in its national savings rate to one of the highest rates in the world. Unlike the socialist period when consumption was repressed in order to redirect resources to investment, most of these savings are voluntary. This paper addresses why China’s savings rates are so high and the implications for China’s economy.

Over the last two decades, the most prominent social and economic changes in the world have been observed in formerly socialist economies. The process, commonly understood as ‘transition’, has gendered consequences and differential implications for men and women. Though much of the research on transitional economies has overlooked the gender dimension, some recent studies on Russia and Central ...

This paper explores patterns of transformation of socialist S&T systems into postsocialist systems of innovation and their determinants. First, we reinterpret the socialist period from a systems of innovation perspective by revisiting the socialist S&T system and by pointing to its general features as well as to its national and sectoral variations. Second, we develop a conceptual model to help...

Galina Ivanova Ustvolskaya was born in 1919 in Petrograd and has lived there throughout her life.1 She had her formal musical training in the Leningrad Conservatory between 1937 and 1950, where she studied with Shostakovich. 2 Later she worked as a teacher in the same institution for most of her life. Although the Soviet Union possessed an elaborate system of music education (Schwarz, 1965, p. ...

Twenty-five years after the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the European East-West divide has not been relegated to the annals of history. Among other areas, it persists tenaciously within the ethnological/anthropological sciences practised in Europe. This article deconstructs and challenges reified differences between ethnologies in Central-Eastern Europe and Western, mainly British-s...

The restructuring of telecommunication in Central and Eastern Europe occurs at a time when the classical structures of telecommunication are falling apart worldwide. Coming from the socialist system in which telecommunication did not exist as an independent economic activity, the Eastern European countries have created specific “post-socialist“ modes of reform, often outdoing Western countries ...

The debate about the status and purpose of individual rights as against social rights depends a great deal on how we define these terms. Although it is difficult to come to a definitive philosophical or jurisprudential conclusion about social versus individual rights, textbooks on human rights recognize the difference between the two traditions (Gearon 2003). Furthermore, the difference between...

Many transition policies, based on neoclassical economics, failed in Eastern Europe, Former Soviet Union, and China. The paper argues that the failure is due to the viability assumption of the neoclassical economics. The neoclassical economics implicitly assumes a firm to be able to earn a socially acceptable profit in an open, competitive market if the firm has a normal management. However, ma...

Ignazio Silone, one of the founders of the Italian Communist Party, has written strikingly about the role of moral commitment in radical theory. ‘The more Socialist theories claim to be “scientifi c”’, he suggests, ‘the more transitory they are; but Socialist values are permanent. The distinction between theories and values is not suffi ciently recognized, but it is fundamental. On a group of t...