Towards Market Economies: The IMF and the Economic Transition in Russia and Other Former Soviet Countries

by John Odling-Smee

The book is about economic developments and policies in the first decade or so after the independence of the fifteen countries that emerged from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. From 1992 to 2003, the author was in charge of the IMF’s work on the fifteen countries that emerged from the former Soviet Union. In those years, the countries were beginning the transition from the Soviet central planning system towards market economies. The book focuses on the role of the IMF in this transition. It explains what the IMF was trying to do and why.

Genres: Economics

250 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 9, 2022

Reviews

[Albert Jaeger · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a memoir about the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) initial engagement with the 15 countries that emerged from the sudden implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991. During the period 1991-2003 covered by the book, the author was the head of the IMF department that had primary responsibility for advising the new IMF member countries on their macroeconomic and international finance challenges.

The primary audience for this book will certainly include readers interested in the theory and practice of transition economics, but it will likely also become an important document for future historians of a period that was once (by some) prematurely labelled the “end of history.”

The book’s style, coming from a former IMF employee, is unusually free of jargon and self-serving observations; the book is also, at times, charmingly self-deprecating and a genuinely humorous read.

I thought the most interesting part of the book was the chapter on Russia, which is also by far the longest and most detailed chapter when it comes to describing colorful personalities, wicked economic problems, and fast-cooked policy solutions (which went at times badly awry).

The chapter on Ukraine, titled “Someday We Will,” had a haunting quality (for this reader) given Ukraine’s on-going struggle to fend off an aggressive Russia keen on re-creating another version of the former Russian empire (even if that means, as it looks like, for Russia to end up as a vassal state of China). There are shorter chapters or sections that deal with the wide-ranging challenges of the other 13 former Soviet states.