ABSTRACT
Introduction Every society has to produce, distribute and allocate the goods and services required by its citizens. All societies, in consequence, have an economy of some type. Economies, however, can be organised in various ways. To depict how an economy is structured, three modes of delivering goods and services have been commonly differentiated, namely the ‘market’ (private sector), the ‘state’ (public sector) and the ‘community’ (informal or third) sector (Boswell 1990; Giddens 1998; Gough 2000; Polanyi 1944; Powell 1990; Putterman 1990), even if different labels are sometimes attached to these realms, with Polanyi (1944) referring to ‘market exchange’, ‘redistribution’ and ‘reciprocity’, and Giddens (1998) discussing ‘private’, ‘public’ and ‘civil society’. Taking these three modes of delivering goods and services as our starting point, the aim of this chapter is to begin to challenge the widespread consensus which exists regarding the trajectory of economic development in post-Soviet spaces, namely that the transition to the market economy is complete. This discourse relies on two assumptions. First, in all economies it is believed that goods and services are being increasingly produced and delivered through the formal (market and state) sphere rather than through the community or informal sphere (henceforth known as the ‘formalisation’ thesis); and second, that this formal production and delivery of goods and services is increasingly occurring through the market sector, rather than by the public sector (the ‘marketisation’ thesis). In other words, there is a belief that post-Soviet spaces, as Chapter 2 showed, are moving towards the production and delivery of goods and services through the formal economy in general and the formal market economy more particularly. The intention of this chapter is thus to evaluate empirically this narrative on the direction of post-Soviet economies. It starts by analysing the two metanarratives about the trajectory of economic development, namely formalisation and marketisation. Then, in order to challenge the widely accepted view that the transition to the market is complete, the following section presents discussion of how this has started to be empirically and theoretically challenged. This sets the scene for the book’s following chapters, which seek to re-read the configuration of the economic and economy in contemporary post-Soviet spaces.
