THE RUSSIAN AND ARGENTINIAN EXPERIENCES OF RADICAL REFORM: BETWEEN ECONOMY AND POLITICS
THE RUSSIAN AND ARGENTINIAN EXPERIENCES OF RADICAL REFORM: BETWEEN ECONOMY AND POLITICS

Summary/Abstract: The 1970s and 80s saw a wave of market liberalization in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, but also in the United States and Western Europe. It reached Central and Eastern Europe just as the socialist bloc was disintegrating. To explain this exceptionally universal movement, a number of studies have emphasized that the changes went hand in hand with a very specific reconfiguration of the frameworks and actors implicated in the development and implementation of the decisions to liberalize. Despite their richness and detail, these studies tend to focus on the decision-makers and base their conclusions on an overly monolithic idea of how the reforms were implemented. A detailed comparison between two countries permits us to assess the differences and similarities of two recent cases of radical reform. In order to analyze the complex interaction of economics and politics—whose definitions and boundaries have changed noticeably in the course of these transformations—we will study the cases of Argentina and the USSR (Russia) during the period beginning with their first steps toward market liberalization in the 1970s and ending with the neoliberal crisis of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.

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