Please do not quoteUNCHARTED WATERS, PIRATE RAIDS, AND SAFE HAVENS: A PARSIMONIOUS MODEL OF TRANSITION PROGRESS Paper prepared for Tenth Dubrovnik Economic Conference
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper has benefited from comments at several seminars at the University of Toronto, The IMF, Bank of Finland, and Stern School of Business, N.Y.U. I am grateful to the participants for their suggestions. The views in this paper are entirely my own and do not in any way represent those of the IMF Management or Board of Directors. 1 The paper seeks a relatively simple set of explanatory factors explaining the success or failure in transition for the non Asian transition countries. First, it shows that the EBRD transition index is a good proxy for progress being closely correlated with other economic performance measures. Then it proposes a parsimonious model explaining progress, comprised of three determinants: the delays in reform due to internal debates on how to move to a market economy, the extent of rent-seeking opportunities thus created and the resulting vulnerability of the polity to state capture, and finally the role of EU membership prospects acting as an external commitment to market reform Empirical analyses of econometric and case-study type concerning privatization effects, relation to state capture, and opinion poll and voting analysis are adduced as evidence for the dominant role of these three explanatory factors. The most important conclusion is that contrary to popular views that further progress on liberalization and democratization is inevitable because new capitalists want security of property rights and hence rule of law, it is shown here that where ownership is concentrated and “oligarchs ’ capture the state they favour the status quo of partial reforms and a non-transparent political process.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.038 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".