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Transition from a centrally planned to a market-based system in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) started about a decade ago and - by its very name - was meant to end at some point in time. Has this date arrived yet? Or are we in the midst of the "transition from transition", is it "transformation", "post-transition", even "integration", or just plain "development"? Does anybody care anyway? They should, not least because the (alleged) transition countries still receive a very special kind of treatment, for example by being served by a development bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, designed for their transition-specific purposes. If transition were over, publicly financed credit provided by the Bank to these countries could unnecessarily crowd out the private sector, the activities of which should be encouraged as a matter of first priority.
The plethora of available terms reflects the confusion among economists about what the "end of transition" is exactly defined by. Witness for example the discussion in a recent book edited by Annette N. Brown ("When is Transition Over?"), which gathers several transition experts' opinions on the topic. Marie Lavigne considers the question right away as "unanswerable", while at the same time advancing the criterion of EU membership as the only sensible one. Alan Gelb's definition sounds more imaginative, albeit less operational, as he considers transition to be over "when the problems and policy issues confronted by today's transition countries resemble those faced by others at similar levels of development." In his view, "we are not there yet". Anders Aslund focuses on the reduction of rent-seeking, and therefore concludes that transition is over in all but a few countries. Jan Svejnar establishes two conditions for the end of transition: the abolition of central planning and the presence of an efficiently functioning market system. Despite the EU Commission's assessment that the latter is indeed the case at least in some of the more advanced candidate countries, Svejnar denies the end of transition. Janos Kornai argues that transition is over in Hungary and "probably...