Collegium Budapest - János Kornai

János Kornai's own homepage: www.kornai-janos.hu

János Kornai (81) is Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University. Between 1992 and 2002 he was Permanent Fellow, since October 2002 he has been Permanent Fellow Emeritus at Collegium Budapest.

Kornai's PhD dissertation, entitled 'Overcentralization', written before and published after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution by Oxford University Press, was the first critical book on the command economy written by an 'insider', that is, by a citizen of a communist state. Later, instead of participating in futile debates on the theoretical potential of socialism, he shifted the research agenda to a factual, positive, and highly critical analysis of the existing communist system. His most influential book on the subject was The Economics of Shortage, which demonstrated that chronic shortages are not consequences of planners' errors or the wrong prices, but rather systemic, that is, the inevitable consequences of the traditional, 'classical' communist system. The book has been translated into many languages in China it has sold over 100,000 copies. Kornai's theory of socialism is summarized in his book The Socialist System.

The events of the last decade motivated a shift in his research interests. In 1989, he published The Road to a Free Economy, the first book outlining the tasks of transition. It has been published in 17 languages, in both East and West. He has written several studies on the central issues of transition, including privatization, macro-stabilization, and the reform of the welfare state.

János Kornai served as President of the Econometric Society, President of the European Economic Association and also President of the International Economic Association. He is Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and of five other Academies. He has been awarded honorary doctorates from a number of leading universities. He has received the highest Hungarian prizes for scholarship, as well as the Seidman Award (USA), and the Humboldt Prize (Germany). He has also become Officer of the Ordre National de la Légion d'Honneur (France).

He was the co-director of the Honesty and Trust project.

Find more information here: http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/kornai/kornai.html
http://www.mindentudas.hu/kornaijanos/index.html

NEW:

Detailed information about the memoirs: www.kornai-memoirs.hu

Press release of AAASS (American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies)

János Kornai, Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics Emeritus at Harvard University and Permanent Fellow Emeritus at Collegium Budapest, has been awarded the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies for an outstanding publication on the political economy of the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet Union and East Central Europe and their transitional successors, for By Force of Thought: Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey, published by the MIT Press recently.

The award was presented at the Awards Presentation during the 39th National Convention of the AAASS held in New Orleans, Louisiana on 17th November, 2007. Laudation of AAASS

Mit jelent a rendszervaltas? - kiserlet a fogalom tisztazasara
Megjelent: Szocializmus, Kapitalizmus, Demokrácia és Rendszerváltás, Akadémiai Kiadó, 2007.

What does the change of system mean?
In: From Socialism to Capitalism, forthcoming, Budapest, Central European University Press

Books

Overcentralization in Economic Administration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959. Second edition: 1994. Also in Hungarian, (1957, 1990).

Mathematical Planning of Structural Decisions. With contributions by Tamás Lipták and Péter Wellisch. Amsterdam: North-Holland and Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1967, second extended edition: 1975. Also in Hungarian (1965), Slovak (1966), German, (1967) and Polish (1969).

Anti-Equilibrium. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1971. Second and third edition in English: 1975, 1991. Also in Hungarian, (1971), Romanian (1974), German (1975), Japanese: (1975), Polish (1977), and Croatian (1983).

Rush versus Harmonic Growth. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1972. Also in Hungarian, (1972), Czech (1977), Spanish (1977), and Chinese (1988).

Economics of Shortage. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1980. Also in Hungarian, (1980, 1982, 1989), Czech (1981-1982), French (1984), Polish (1985), Chinese (1986, 1998), and Russian (1990).

Growth, Shortage and Efficiency. Oxford: Basil Blackwell and Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982. Also in Hungarian, (1982), Estonian (1985), Chinese (1986), and Polish (1986).

Contradictions and Dilemmas. Budapest: Corvina, 1985 and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986. Also in Hungarian, (1985), Vietnamese (1988), and Estonian (1992).

The Road to a Free Economy. Shifting from a Socialist System: The Example of Hungary. New York: W. W. Norton and Budapest: HVG Kiadó, 1990. Also in Hungarian, (1989), Russian (1990), Czech (1990), Slovak (1990), French (1990), Italian (1990), Spanish (1991), Polish (1991), Ukrainian (1991), Estonian (1992), Japanese (1992), Serbian (1992), Tamil (1992), Sinhalese (1992), Chinese (1994) and Vietnamese (2001, 2002)

Vision and Reality, Market and State: New Studies on the Socialist Economy and Society. Budapest: Corvina; Hemel Hempstead and New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf and New York: Routledge, 1990. Also in Hungarian (1989).

The Socialist System. The Political Economy of Communism. Princeton: Princeton University Press and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. In Hungarian (1993), German (1995), French (1996), Bulgarian (1996) Russian (2000) and Vietnamese (2002).

Highway and Byways. Studies on Socialist Reform and Postsocialist Transition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Also in Hungarian (1993), German (1996), and Arabic (1999).

Struggle and Hope. Essays on Stabilization and Reform in a Post-Socialist Economy. Chaltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997. Collection of selected essays, mostly overlapping with Struggle and Hope also in Hungarian (1996), Slovak (1998), Polish (1998), Bulgarian (1998), Romanian (2000), and French (2001).

Paying the Bill for Goulash-Communism. Vol. II. of the Series: Evolution of the Hungarian Economy 1848-1988. New York: Atlantic Research and Publications and Columbia University Press, 2000.

Reforming the State : Fiscal and Welfare Reform in Post-Socialist Countries. Eds.: János Kornai; Stephan Haggard and Robert R. Kaufman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Welfare, Choice and Solidarity in Transition: Reforming the Health Sector in Eastern Europe. Co-author Karen Eggleston, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Also in Vietnamese 2002.

By Force of Thought. Irregular Memoirs of an Intellectual Journey. Cambridge: The MIT Press, published in January 2007. In Hungarian, Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 2005.