FOR TOO LONG THE STUDY OF COMMUNISM AND COMmunist movements has preceded as sui generis, with no concern for its relation to broader academic areas of inquiry or for some of the more pertinent questions of the epoch. Scholars in Communist affairs have passed their colleagues working in other areas of academic inquiry like ships in a foggy sea, heading for similar destinations and using analogou...

The primary function of banks during economic transformation is seen to be provision of an efficient payments mechanism. The lack of banking skills, particularly in credit allocation, is seen as the major problem in achieving stable monetary systems. This is a problem which can be expected to last many years. The solution is to limit banks to very safe assets (initially central bank liabilities...

This paper points to the congruence between political and social variables and the epidemiology of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) in modern China. STDs became a major health problem after the fall of the empire in 1911 and were only reluctantly addressed by a weak nationalist government during the 1930s. During the 1950s and 60s, the communist regime brought STDs under control, but proble...

This study sets out to investigate the changes in the perception of women in leading positions in communist and postcommunist Romania. The study uses a noninvasive paradigm of analyzing the content of obituaries for women and men in leading positions published in a national journal, and shows that the gender gap in management widened during the postcommunist period. In postcommunist Romania, wo...

The Size of the Shadow Economies of 145 Countries all over the World: First Results over the Period 1999 to 2003 Using the DYMIMIC approach, estimates of the shadow economy in 145 developing, transition, developed OECD countries, South Pacific islands and still communist countries are presented. The average size of the shadow economy (in percent of official GDP) over 2002/2003 in developing cou...

In Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About It), Elizabeth Anderson argues that most people in the United States and other liberal societies spend their working lives under kind of autocratic rule we would normally associate with communist dictatorships. They are forced to work oppressive environments, deprived many freedoms, given practically no say over co...