Joseph Stiglitz Quotes

If you're going to do economic reform, you'd better do it in one fell swoop rather than a little bit at a time.

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.

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.

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.

Essentially we need a new social consensus for economic reform as New Labour has achieved in Britain.

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.

So now we are pushing economic reform, bank reform and enterprise reform. So we can finish that reform this year, in September or October. Then our economy may be much more, you know, normalized.

The government is determined to bring the program back on track, and proceed with the privatizations.

The people in Poland had to deal with painful reforms.

Executing the massive transformation they [the Chinese reform leaders] envision will take most of their political capital and will require firm political control, even as the reforms generate strong forces for social and political change.

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

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.

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.

I do not want to return to the Ukraine of the 1990s and the time of privatization. Ninety-eight percent of Ukrainian companies obey the laws.

It is a set of policies formulated between 15th and 19th streets by the U.S. Treasury, and World Bank. Countries should focus on stabilization, liberalization, privatization.

Indian intellectuals today feel radical when they condemn fundamentalism, but not many people are talking about the links between privatization, globalization, and fundamentalism.

When people were like, "Oh, wow, Donald Trump is so crazy. That's so nuts, what's happening?" in the 9 a.m. meeting, Jon Stewart was like, "No, I've seen this before, in Robert Mugabe. I've seen Trump as an African dictator. You guys don't know about nationalist rhetoric all over Europe?" "No, I thought we were the center of the world." He has the ability to actually talk about that in a real way: "Oh, I've been there. I've talked to people there. This is just the remix on stuff that's been brewing for three, four years." That's something very special.

The message is resonating, not just in Wisconsin, but all over America, the people are sick and tired of establishment politics, establishment economics. They want real change.

The China of the 1970s was a communist dictatorship. The China of the twenty-first century is a one-party state without a firm ideological foundation, more similar to Mexico under the PRI than Russia under Stalin. But the measurement of the political and the economic evolution has not yet been completed, and is one of the weak points of the system.

We see pluralism: We can see that there are different ideological and political positions in Russia. If the authoritarianism finally ends, we will have real competition.

We have moved from an age in which government leaders sought to do what was best for the people to one in which the political leadership is convinced it knows what is best for the people, whether they like it or not.

Donald Trump's got to do some big changes, because what he was voted on. But when you think about how to do it, it would take massive expertise, which his people, believe me, do not have.

The political system of the People's Republic of China can make things easy. Decisions are made quickly and results come quickly, too. In our democracy [in India], on the other hand, such things are extremely difficult.

The European Union that emerges from the Eurozone crisis is going to be a very different body. It will be transformed perhaps beyond recognition by the measures needed to save the Eurozone.