Viktor Yushchenko Quotes

30 years after China embarked on its fitful embrace of the free market, it has no single unifying doctrine—no ‘central melody’—and there is nothing predestined about what kind of country it is becoming.

China's economic transformation began with the introduction in the 1980s of market incentives in the agricultural sector. These reforms were followed by a gradual opening to the global economy, a process that accelerated in the early 1990s.

We will never have Russian-style privatization.

It is true that the U.S. could and should have been more generous as Russia made its painful transition to a market economy in the 1990s.

Privatization came on slowly. When something very big happens, like privatization, historians and economists like to think you must have had very big causes. That is not how it happened.

We will also allow state companies to sell shares to their workers and will pass a law allowing citizens to start companies of their own with no limits on the number of employees or on the firm's output.

I have publicly talked about Mexico's need to open ourselves up to the participation of the private sector in the energy sector, however this doesn't mean privatizing state-run companies.

The privatization law draft was recently released and I believe that very soon we will start applying it, of course taking into consideration the provisions of UNMIK (United Nations Mission in Kosovo).

During these two and a half years that have followed the war, the most urgent problem we have encountered was: to activate the public enterprises, to bring them up to the level that international markets demand and we are just now getting them prepared for privatization.

If I just produce the transparent ideal accepted by the Western experts, a process of privatization which will be very good but never happen, that means nothing.

Poland is much more advanced than Romania in structural reforms.

We saw that the free market economy was not enough when the Harvard boys failed to deliver free market capitalism to Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed.

We are on the our way to a free market economy. Regardless of the mistakes and omissions, the government has managed to implement a firm and consistent economic policy. Regardless of how incomplete it still is, the transition to free market relations and democracy has become irreversible.

The market economy itself was not a product of violent action—of revolutions—but of a series of gradual peaceful changes. The implications of the term “industrial revolution” are utterly misleading.

In post-communist countries, some temporary winners of the reform are found to be an important force in resisting further reforms.

President Yeltsin's instincts were decent: he encouraged the marketplace, the press flourished, and everything started to open - even the KGB archives. Yeltsin reburied Nicholas II. Free from Soviet anti-semitism, he surrounded himself with Jewish capitalists and advisers who returned to public life for the first time since the 1920s.

China adopted a capitalist system in the 1980s, and they went from a 60% poverty rate to 10%.

Mexico is a market economy, but we should have better markets.

Our trend in the privatization process and gradual withdrawal of the state from certain assets remains unchanged.

70 to 80 percent of country economy is controlled by the Bolivian state, and the other percentage by the private sector. We admit that it's legal, constitutional, that the private sector is entitled to its own economy, but to ensure these profound changes that clearly this government is promoting, including profound changes in the food industry, what we are doing is an important step.

China has seen a great deal of economic progress. It's certainly rather of a miracle. The growing role of the market in the economy will force China to open up its political system over time and to move toward a more democratic society. So taken as a whole, the one real failure in this whole business has been Russia.

In the early 1990s, there was a debate among economists over shock therapy versus a gradualism strategy for Russia. The people in Russia who believed in shock therapy were Bolsheviks a few people at the top that rammed it down everybody's throat. They viewed the democratic process as a real impediment to reform.

They'll [China] probably be a fully developed nation. The road there just is not going to be that easy. You're going from a macromanaged, top-down economy to a market-managed, micromanaged type of economy, with all the potential corruption issues, SOE [state-owned enterprise] reform, and market reform that come with it.

The IMF played crucial roles in the 1980s debt crisis and in the transformation of former communist economies. Radical change, many might argue, is neither necessary nor desirable.

The strong economy means there is fiscal firepower and we need to use that to show people the benefits of the free-market system.