A Review of the Book "Stanowiony i spontaniczny ład gospodarczy w procesie transformacji systemowej Polski i byłej NRD" by Anna Grabska, Michał Moszyński i Piotr Pysz

Abstract

The issues of economic order and economic policy are of particular importance in the context of the progressive dominance of neo-liberal doctrine as seemingly the only right way to develop. Assuming the necessity of pluralism and competition among theories in the economic sciences, the authors of the book reviewed examined the issue of economic order and its transformation as exemplified by the market transformation of the economies of Poland and the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). They base their analysis on the thesis put forward by W. Eucken (a German major representative of ordoliberalism) and F. A. von Hayek (a leading representative of the Austrian school of economics): that the economic order has a dominant influence on economic processes. For this purpose, the authors analysed how both the theory of organised order and the spontaneous economic order as well as their interdependencies in the process of system transformation of the former GDR and Poland in the period of 1990-2010 were shaped. The main hypothesis of the research concerns the existence of feedback between economic theory of organised order and spontaneous order, which indicates the dynamic nature of theory of economic order in contrast to the static and abstract models of neoclassical theory and neo-liberalism. The monograph makes a significant contribution to the discussion on the transformation of the economic order in Poland and the former East Germany, while also increasing the application values of the organised order and spontaneous order for economic policy in European countries.