Demand and Supply of Economic Knowledge in Transition Countries (Collective Review)[1] The contribution of Slovak economists to the general development of economic theory seems to be relatively minor, at least if judged on the basis of international encyclopaedias and economists’ vocabularies. To a lesser extent, one may arrive at a similar conclusion about Eastern and Central European economists. For example, Blaug (1986) considers only five economists from the region among the one hundred great economists before Keynes. These are Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz (1868-1931), Rosa Luxemburg (1870-1919), Eugen Slutsky (1880-1948), Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratiev (1892-1931), and Oskar Lange (1904-1965).
[2] Furthermore, Blaug (1985) lists János Kornai as the only Eastern or Central European economist among his one hundred major economists after Keynes. If birthplace counts, then in Blaug’s lists we find Irma Adelman (born in 1930) and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1906-1994) born in Romania; Evsey E. Domar (1914-1997), Michał Kalecki (1899-1970), and Jacob Mincer (born in 1922) born in Poland; Alexander Gerschenkron (1904-1978), Simon Kuznets (1901-1985), Wassily Leontief (1906-1999), Abba Lerner (1903-1982), and Jacob Marschak (1898-1977) born in Russia; Nicholas Káldor (1908-1986), Tibor Scitovsky (born in 1910), and János Kornai (born in 1928) from Hungary; Ludwig von Mises (1881-1973) born in today’s Ukraine; and Jaroslav Vaněk (born in 1928) born in Czechoslovakia.
[3] Eatwell, Murray, and Newman (1991) provide information on a number of major economists who worked in the region. If we do not consider Michail Bakunin, Nikolai Chernyshevski, Vladimir Lenin, Georgi Plekhanov, Yosef Stalin, and Leo Trotsky, then these include: Oskar Nikolyaevich Anderson (1887-1960), Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (1888-1938), Alexander Vasiljevich Chayanov (1888-1939?), Vladimir Karpovich Dmitriev (1868-1913), Grigorii Alexandrovich Feldman (1884-1958), Michał Kalecki, Leonid Vitalievich Kantorovich (1912-1986), Nikolai Dmitrievich Kondratiev, Alexander Alexandrovich Konüs (born in 1895), Oskar Lange, Mihail Manoilescu (1891-1950), Vasily Sergeevich Nemchinov (1894-1964), Vasily Sergeevich Novozhilov (1892-1970), Evgenii Alexeyevich Preobrazhensky (1886-1937), David Borisovich Ryazanov (1870-1938), Eugen Slutsky, Stanislav Gustavovich Strumilin (1877-1974), Pyotr Berngardovich Struve (1870-1944), Mikhail Ivanovich Tugan-Baranovsky (1865-1919), Evgeny Varga (1879-1964), Nikolai Alekseevich Voznesensky (1903-1950), Wladimir Savelievich Woytinsky (1885-1960), Władysław Marian Zawadzki (1885-1939), and Nikolaj Ivanovich Ziber (1844-1885). But none of them is associated with Slovakia.
[4] One may then assume that Slovak economists, being from a European periphery and working for a certain period under authoritarian rule, can probably be found in the dictionaries of dissenting (non-mainstream) economists. But in a representative dictionary of dissenting economists edited by Arestis and Sawyer (1992), we find no Slovak economist. Again, if birthplace counts, then one finds Thomas Balogh (1905-1985), Paul Alexander Baran (1910-1964), Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas Káldor, Rosa Luxemburg, Michał Kalecki, and Alec Nove (1915-1994) coming from the region.
[5] Furthermore, Wagener (1998) considers nineteen eminent East European economists who were active after World War II. These were Fritz Behrens (1909-1980) and Gunther Kohlmey (born in 1913) from the former East Germany; Włodzimierz Brus (born in 1921), Michał Kalecki, Oskar Lange, and Edward Lipiński (1888-1986) from Poland; Josef Goldmann (1912-1984), Václav Klaus (born in 1941), Ota Šik (born in 1919), and Miroslav Toms (1944-1988), Czech nationals from the former Czechoslovakia; Aleksander Bajt (born in 1921) and Branko Horvat (born in 1928) from the former Yugoslavia; Leonid Kantorovich, Vasily Nemchinov, Vasily Novozhilov, and Nikolai Petrakov (born in 1937) from the former Soviet Union; and János Kornai, Gyorgy Péter (1903-1969), and István Varga (1887-1962) from Hungary. Again, none of them is a Slovak national or a foreign national who has lived in Slovakia.
[6] Furthermore, Havel, Klacek, Kosta, and Šulc (1998), who extensively review economic theorizing in the former socialist Czechoslovakia, mention no Slovak economist, nor do they include among their references any articles or books published in the Slovak language or in Bratislava. If my reading of their paper is correct, then the only high-ranking Slovak economists they mention are Eugen Löbl, who was imprisoned in the early 1950s, and Jozef Kučerák, who organized a reading course based on the Samuelson-Nordhaus textbook for young Slovak economists. 2 (Note2: Jiřì Havel told the author of this essay that originally this issue was to be addressed in the appendix; but for technical reasons this idea never materialized.)
[7] In these various prestigious and competent listings, no mention is made of any economist from Slovakia. Thus, as a first approximation, one may say that there seems to be no significant Slovak economist and thus no significant contribution by Slovak nationals to the development of economic theory. This also means no specific Slovak school of economic theory, like those observable in some smaller nations, for example Sweden or the Netherlands.
[8] However, as I show in this text, the state of economic theory in Slovakia can be seen in a more positive way. There have always been able economists in Slovakia; most of the time their analytical and pedagogical abilities made their work a contribution to the understanding of economic matters in Slovakia. And since we do not want to erode our own historical consciousness, the story of the development of this stock of knowledge and opinions deserves to be told.
[9] Czechoslovakia, as founded in 1918, consisted of two quite different parts: the more developed Czech Lands with an industrial tradition stemming from the 19th century and the less developed, agriculturally oriented Slovakia. During the first twenty years of the Czechoslovak state (1918-1938), the level of development in Slovakia improved, but Slovakia’s share in the total industrial production and in the total income of Czechoslovakia increased only slightly. During the socialist period, some basic indicators of output and consumption per capita in Slovakia achieved a level close to the Czech Lands. 3 (Note3: For an empirical discussion of convergence between the Czech Lands and Slovakia, see Křovák and Zamrazilová (1992), Estrin and Urga (1997), and Fidrmuc, Horváth, Fidrmuc (1999).) This economic growth was also reflected in the increased quality of human capital and research.
[10] A Concise Encyclopedia of Slovakia and the Slovaks mentions two important economists active before 1918. One was Michal Baluďanský (1769-1847), the author of eight volumes on national economy, who studied at universities in Vienna and Budapest and in 1804 became a professor in St. Petersburg, where he was a rector of the university in 1819-21. The encyclopedia, titled in Russian Enciklopeditcheskij Slovar and published in 1891 in Saint Petersburg, spells his name Michail Andrejevich Balugjanskij and calls him a Carpatho-Russian born in Hungary. The second economist is Kornel Stodola (1866-1946), who was an important businessman, political figure, and prolific writer on economic subjects (see Strhan and Daniel, 1994).
[11] A Representative Biographical Lexicon of Slovakia also mentions two economists active before 1918. These are Gregor František Berzevici (1763-1822) and, again, Kornel Stodola. Berzevici (spelled Berzeviczy Gergely in Hungarian) published one of the first economic studies in the region under the title De commercio et industria Hungariae in 1797. His main political economy work was not published until 1902, under the title Oeconomia Publico Politica. See Maťovčík (1999: 35-36). Lisý, Petričová, and Čaplánova (1999: 308) also mention Berzeviczy as an important economist in their chapter on the development of economic thinking in Slovakia, and they consider Milan Hodža (1878-1944) the most important representative of Slovak economic thinking in the pre-1918 period. Petričová (1996) reviews those representatives of the Slovak national movement who dealt with economic issues and problems. These include Samuel Tešedík (1742-1820), Jozef Ignác Bajza (1755-1836), Juraj Fándly (1751-1811), Ľudovít Štúr (1815-1856), B. Vrchovský (1812-1865), Peter Kellner-Hostinský (1823-1853), Samuel Jurkovič (1796-1873), and Daniel Lichard (1818-1882). In addition to other, already mentioned personalities, Lisý (1996) considers Anton Bielek (1857-1911), Peter Kompiš (1859-1929), and Fedor Houdek (1877-1953).
[12] After 1918, when the Czechoslovak Republic was founded, this picture slowly changed. During the first Czechoslovak Republic, Czech national economists achieved greater prominence than the Slovak ones, as the examples of Karel Engliš, Alois Rašín, Albín Bráf, and Josef Macek best document. Czech economists (like Cyril Čechrák, A. Basch) held important teaching positions at Comenius University after its founding in 1919, see Korček (1996: 42).
[13] This period saw the emergence of the first group of Slovak economists who can be considered to represent the beginnings of Slovak economic thinking. They include Imrich Karvaš (1903-1981), Rudolf Briška (1908-1971), Július Pázmán (1907-1982), and Peter Zaťko (1903-1978). Some of these economists played a controversial role during the period of 1939-1945. Before the country’s breakup in the Second World War, some other economists had emigrated from Slovakia, and at least one of them, Ervin Hexner, had achieved a prominent position in the USA.
[14] Pure and applied economic theory went through impressive developments after the Second World War. But to a large extent, the communist revolution isolated the community of Czech-Slovak economists from these trends. Economists reacted in different ways to this "exogenous shock". Some economists left the country (Macek), some did not return (Hexner), some did not continue to publish (Engliš, Karvaš), but most of the younger generation of economists accepted the requirements of the new era. There was also an emigration of economists after 1948 and after 1968, of whom Gregor Lazarčik and Mikuláš Luptáčik were probably the most eminent.
[15] There were a large number of talented economists in Slovakia during the socialist period (1948-1989). They were mostly professors at the High School of Economics (Vysoká Škola Ekonomická), after 1989 renamed the University of Economics (Ekonomická Univerzita) in Bratislava, and at other schools and research institutions, and/or they worked as advisors to government. Some of them were reformists, some followed strictly the Communist Party line, and some of them were pure scholars. Clearly, the group that consisted of reformers, counter-reformers, and policy-makers was much larger than the group of pure scholars. Most of them were well read and very interested in their work. They contributed to the increasing understanding of economic matters in Slovakia, but they also put economic theory on an unproductive path. Under socialism there were clearly institutions that provided disincentives to originality or simply to productive research activity. Socialist institutions provided few incentives or rewards for increasing the stock of knowledge about Slovak or more general economic matters.
[16] Most of the professional discussion in Slovakia in the period 1948-1989 was conducted in the jargon of Marxist social theory. This was the tribal language or a veil under which from time to time interesting intellectual contributions were made. I am aware that, from the position of general economic theory, most of the contributions made under socialism in all socialist countries were minor, and this is also the case in Slovakia. As Wagener (1998: 24) writes, "looked at from the point of view of the universal history of economic theory, economics under communism has not produced any spectacular new insights, theorems, laws or controversies which have to be memorized by all students of economics like, for example, the Cambridge controversy, Say’s law, the Coase theorem or the Heckscher-Ohlin theory." This statement seems to hold also for contributions concerning socialist theory or radical political economy.
[17] I divide these discussions and contributions into two principal streams. The first current of discussions deals with the relationship between the (central) plan and the market, which in the Slovak context to a large extent is discussion on the specifics of Slovakia in the Czechoslovak economy. The second current is represented in the literature, which maintained contact with modern economic theory, especially in the subfields of econometrics and operation research.
[18] The first current is the discussion about the relationship between the plan and the market. As in any socialist country, this discussion reflected policy and political views inside the Communist Party as well as in the economic community. In Czechoslovakia, these discussions were concentrated in Prague, in the 1960s as well as later in the 1980s. Discussing the reform debate of the 1960s, Adam (1993) divides the participating economists into four groups according to their views on the relationship between the plan and the market. He reviews the views of Czech economists from Jaroslav Vejvoda through Ota Šik and Karel Kouba to Oldřich Kýn, i.e., from the most orthodox conservative to radical liberal, in the jargon of the 1960s. Concerning the Slovak discussion, he writes: "Marketisation of the economy had more enthusiastic adherents in the Czech lands than in Slovakia. In the latter, there was some concern that the market might hamper further equating of the economic level in Slovakia with that in the Czech lands. In their outline of the further development of the reform, Slovak economists maintained that ‘economic evening out in Slovakia will be more complicated in a management model based on market relations’, and therefore suggested a series of measures to ensure further equalization." (Náčrt ďalšieho, 1969: 52). One can accept the view that the Slovak economists were rather passive in the direct discussion about the relationship between the plan and the market. Rather, in the Slovak economic discussion, the issue of misallocation of resources under central planning appeared in the context of the centralized decision-making process, which - the argument ran - hurt Slovak economic interests. In this spirit, a series of papers appeared that dealt in a self-constrained way with the issue of the Slovak economy’s specific position in Czechoslovakia. Authors of such papers included Turčan (1955), Kočtúch (1964), Pavlenda (1965), Džuban, Kočtúch, and Pračko (1966), Pračko (1968), Briatka (1969), Lipták (1969), and Bálek (1982).
[19] The second current in Slovak economic thinking maintained contact with the advancements of economic theory in the Western countries. Here, considerable advancement was achieved in econometrics, operation research, and the mathematical foundations of modern economic theory. One example is an official university textbook on dynamic modeling edited by Adam Laščiak (1985); the co-authors include Miroslav Maňas, Jaroslav Samek, Josef Lauber, Juraj Trnovský, and Miroslav Hysko. This book contains a sophisticated treatment of mathematics for graduate macroeconomics and optimization, as well as a review of various macroeconomic and sectoral models used in the Czechoslovak Republic during the socialist period. There is also a textbook in a similar spirit on optimal programming, also edited by Laščiak (1983); the co-authors include Jozef Sojka, Ladislav Unčovský, Ján Šimkovic, Roman Hušek, Miroslav Maňas, Michal Chobot, Eduard Hozlár, and Vladimír Ulašin; and the book includes monographs by Jozef Sojka (1970) and Ladislav Unčovský (1985). However, the impact of these books on the general public and on policy-making was minor.
[20] This second current also includes the work of Štefan Heretik, Ľudovít Korček, Ján Iša, Drahomír Šíbl, Monika Šestáková, and others who were involved in one way or another in what was called the "critique of bourgeois economic theory". To some extent, this "critique" played a positive role in transporting the work of Western economists to Slovakia; Heretik (1988) is a good example of this work. However, the university curriculum did little to present major contemporary Western economic thought. It was taught superficially and thus did not help to raise the level of the young generation of economists who studied Western economic thinking under the pretext of its critique.
[21] Economic research lacked empirical orientation. This tendency remains in Slovak economic theory making, even after the breakup of the socialist regime. One of the reasons may be that the communist regime did not particularly encourage searching for facts; but also, the Slovak economy was a part of the larger Czechoslovak economy, and some data were simply not available on the level of individual republics. This low level of empirically oriented research also meant that economic policy decisions were made in a vacuum.
[22] Noteworthy translations were made of Smith, Ricardo, Weber, and Schumpeter. However, to my knowledge, no basic or intermediate undergraduate Western textbooks were translated into the Slovak language during the socialist period. There was also no translation of economists active after the Second World War.
[23] Economists in Slovakia were typically not dissidents during the socialist period. Even in the Czech Lands, most dissidents emerged from non-economist circles. Unlike in Prague, economists in Slovakia did not form discussion clubs around leading personalities. In an interview, Mikloš gave a good description of this situation: "In the Czech Republic there was a strong group of economists around future Czech Prime Minister Václav Klaus, Tomáš Ježek, and others, who held meetings and taught themselves; … Slovakia, on the other hand, lacked that kind of community, and the general level of economic sciences was considerably lower." (2001: 4) Some Slovak economists - those who lived in Prague during the 1980s - participated in these Prague discussion circles. 4 (Note4: These included the author of this essay and some other Slovak economists who did not continue an academic career in the 1990s. See for example Horváth (1985), Horváth and Ježek (1987). )