Read All Instructions Carefully. Use a big, clean blue book. Be sure to put your name on the blue book cover, but not inside it. On the inside of the front cover, tell me the letter of the short answer and number of the essay topic you are skipping. If you answer more than necessary, I will skip the last one(s) in your blue book. Both the quality and the content of your essay counts.

I. Shorter Essays. Answer two of the following three questions. Each is worth 20%.

a. Discuss the major economic reforms in China after the death of Chairman Mao. Contrast reforms in agriculture, international trade, and industry. What is the significance of the "Socialist Market Economy," and what reforms and policies does it entail? How have China's industrial reforms helped to cause its current banking crisis?

b. How did Japan transform its economy after the Meiji Restoration? How did the Japanese economy perform? In what ways is the relationship of government and business unique? How did Japan's industrial policies help cause the stagnation of the Japanese economy since 1990?

c. Describe the major economic policies of Tito's Yugoslavia before the breakup. How did this economy differ from the classical socialist economy? How did it perform, and how did the design of its economic institutions lead to its peculiar problems?

1. How was the classical socialist economy of the Soviet Union designed, and how did it actually work? What was its political environment? What were its major institutions? What was its primary strategy for economic growth? Was it based on intensive or extensive growth? How did it perform, and how did its performance change over time? What were the major attempts to reform it? How did these reforms affect economic performance, and why?

2. What are the major elements required of a strategy to transition to a market economy? How is transition different from reform? What problems are likely to be experienced along the transition path? Compare and contrast the policies of economic transition after the fall of communism in Russia, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Pay particular attention to how these economies performed in transition, and why.

3. Contrast the systems and policies of War Communism and the New Economic Policy under Lenin. What purposes was each of these systems designed to serve? What led to the end of the NEP? What replaced it? Explain the debate between the teleologists and the geneticists after the death of Lenin. How does this debate compare to the modern debate over a sudden versus gradual economic transition to capitalism?

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