János Kornai

János Kornai (also Josef Kornai), (1928-), born in Budapest, Hungary is an economists, one of the one of the most respected specialists on the workings of the socialism and communism economic systems and one of their harshest critics. His works have been translated into many languages, including English.

Biography

Professor Kornai studied on Karl Marx University of Economics , in Budapest and holds a 'candidate' degree from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. In addition, he has been awarded numerous honorary doctorates from distinguished universities around the world. He was a Member of the Board of the Hungarian National Bank (Central Bank) until 2001, and has authored many economics-related books and papers. From 1958 onward Kornai received many invitations to visit foreign institutions, but he was denied a passport by the Hungarian communist authorities and was not allowed to travel until 1963, after political repression had begun to ease.

From 1967 until 1992 he has been a Research Professor at the Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Kornai joined the faculty of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, in 1986 and was named the Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics there in 1992. In the same year, he became a Permanent Fellow of Collegium Budapest, Institute for Advanced Study. He retired from Harvard in 2002.

Works

In the late 1950s, he was among those initiating the use of mathematical methods in socialist planning. He elaborated the theory of two-level planning with Tamás Lipták and directed the first large-scale economy-wide multi-level planning project. Professor Kornai's early article Overcentralization (1953) created a stir in the West and represented his first disillusionment with the communist central planning.

In his Economics of Shortage article from 1980, perhaps his most influential work, Kornai demonstrated that chronic shortages are not the consequences of planners’ errors or the wrong prices, but rather systemic, that is, the inevitable consequences of the 'classical' communist economic system. In his 1988 book, The Socialist System. The Political Economy of Communism he argues the socialist system is based on the unchallenged control by a Marxist-Leninist communist party advocating the elimination of capitalism and a transition towards communism, which extends its control to a predominance of state ownership of the means of production in order to eliminate capitalist relations of production. This leads to a predominance of bureaucratic administration of state firms , through centralized planning and management, and the use of administrative pricing to eliminate the dictates of the market, leading to individual responses to the incentives of this system, ultimately causing observable and inescapable economic phenomena of the socialist system, the shortage economy). Kornai is very skeptical of efforts to create market socialism, because of the inherent conflict between state ownership, private markets, and individual incentives.

His later works like The Road to a Free Economy (1990), Highway and Byways (1995), Struggle and Hope (1997) and Welfare in Transition (2001) deal with macroeconomic aspects and the interaction between politics and economic policy in the period of post-socialist transition in the post-Soviet states. At present he leads a comprehensive research project, Honesty and Trust in the Light of Post-Socialist Transition at Collegium Budapest , where he now is an emeritus fellow .

See also

• Stanislaw Gomulka

External links

• Biography from Harvard University, PDF file