by Maisie Allison
Andrei Shleifer, a Russian-born, American-trained economist and professor at Harvard, offers seven lessons of transition from communism (or "heavy statism") to capitalism. Among them, patience:
[I]n all countries in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, economic activity shrunk at the beginning of transition, in some very sharply. In many countries, economic decline started earlier, but still continued. In Russia, the steepness and the length of the decline (almost a decade) was a big surprise. … The main lesson of this experience is for reformers not to count on an immediate return to growth. Economic transformation takes time.
The Dish 