The Political Economy of Crisis Management in East–Central European Countries

Martin Myant, Jan Drahokoupil and Ivan Lesay

Europe-Asia Studies, 2013, vol. 65, issue 3, 383-410

Abstract: The financial and economic crisis in the Central and East European countries raised the profile of economic policy themes that relate to the role of taxation and state spending. The key policy differences related to public budgets and support for a demand stimulus. Responses fall broadly into two categories that we link to a social-democratic and a neo-liberal response. The distinction indicates that the policy responses were linked to the party affiliation of the government on the left–right spectrum. There were some remarkable common trends that cannot be explained by the logical requirements of the economic situation alone. There are differences in timing and in severity, but every country has at some point moved towards a policy of balancing the budget by making cuts. In all cases there were cuts in benefits for marginal groups in society and a switch towards indirect rather than direct taxes. These carry clear distributional implications.

Date: 2013
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09668136.2013.779460 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ceasxx:v:65:y:2013:i:3:p:383-410

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ceas20

DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2013.779460

Access Statistics for this article

Europe-Asia Studies is currently edited by Terry Cox

More articles in Europe-Asia Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().