For five months in 2013–2014, Dušan Pavlović took time off from teaching to accept a senior position in Serbia’s Ministry of Economy. This short period was long enough for him to make a penetrating diagnosis of the economic activity of the postcommunist government. He found that a coterie of tycoons and politicians live off the wealth of the majority of citizens and smaller entrepreneurs, while the economy performs below its capacities. In academic terms, extractive economic institutions create allocative inefficiency.
Vivid, suggestive, and even entertaining accounts depict how privatization is administered and foreign investment projects are handled, and how party members, relatives, and friends are hired into public administration and state-owned companies. They show how the managers of firms that queue for state subsidies resist the systematic screening of their businesses. The principles of Keynesian economics are distorted and misused to conceal deliberate fiscal mismanagement. Huge ill-conceived development projects siphon taxpayers’ money from “non-economic” activities like social services, health, education, science, and culture.
What Pavlović found in Serbia is acutely symptomatic of many other European post-communist regimes of our time, lending his book singular importance.
- Cover
- Front matter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 The Rise of Aleksandar Vučić
- The Origin of the Book
- The Rise of Aleksandar Vučić 3
- “You Will Not Come to This Show Alive”
- The First Million… and a Few More
- A Ten-Minute Meeting on Economic Reforms
- Keynesian Economics for Fools
- 2 Overview of the Political Economy of Serbia Prior to 2012
- Serbia as Part of Yugoslavia (1918–1989)
- Under Milošević (1990–2000)
- The Fall of Milošević and the DOS Coalition (2000–2012)
- Serbia under Aleksandar Vučić (2012–2014)
- 3 Extractive Institutions
- The FAP Workers’ Protest
- Is It Rational to Delay Reforms?
- The Etihad Contract
- Fast Lane Economy
- 4 Party Patronage
- The Meeting at the Delfi Bookstore
- “I’ll Put Together a Fabulous Team”
- The First Meeting of the Team
- Party Patronage in the Ministry of Economy
- The Car, the Office, and the Secretary
- Coping with Party Patronage in the Ministry
- 5 The Four Economic Policy Strategies
- A Rich Friend Comes to Help
- “Only a Madman Would Abolish Subsidies”
- The Meeting with the Galenika Creditors
- Michelin “Invests” in Serbia
- The Fiat Subsidy Per Car
- Where Are the Contracts with Gorenje?
- The Frankenstein Ministry
- 6 Inside the Money-Wasting Machine
- The Emergence of SIEPA
- “We Have Never Done That”
- Civil Servants in the Serbian Public Administration
- Protection
- The Development Fund
- Figures in the Ballpark
- The Fund’s Clients
- 7 Privatization
- Privatization as a Part of the Money-Wasting Machine
- Privatization: The Second Run
- The 2001 Privatization Law
- The Enterprises in Restructuring
- The “ID Cards”
- More is Less?
- Less is More?
- The Five Steps
- “Hang On, Are We Supposed to Read Those?”
- Privatization of Vršački Vinogradi
- A Firm for a Luxurious Chocolate Box
- The Privatization Agency
- “Give Me Back My Money!”
- 8 The Exit
- Getting Out Before It Is Too Late
- The Smear Campaign Begins
- The Perception of the Public
- The Drafts Blocked by the Socio-Economic Council
- The Media Blackout and the Media Lynching
- Cancelled Appearance on “Impression of the Week” on January 26
- A Party Apparatchik Takes Up Radulović’s Post
- What Happened Afterwards
- 9 The Resignation
- Major Protagonists of the Book in 2013–2014
- Index
- Back cover
Text
Audio
Adobe DRM
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