Richard N. Haass Quotes

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.

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

India needs to come out of its socialist pattern of doing things on a rationing basis.

We will never have Russian-style privatization.

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.

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.

The United States particularly abandoned Liberia after the end of the Cold War.

One might have thought that the most significant change in the film industry that would come about with a transition from the communist economy to capitalism would fundamentally concern the sources of funding.

I was among one of the first entrepreneurs to start building their own private enterprise when Perestroika began in Russia and the state initiated its first market-oriented reforms.

We have established a new basis in our country in which economic liberalization would continue to flourish alongside democratic forces and deregulated power structure.

We're going to have to forgive a great deal of the Soviet era debt. There's no question about that. Let's face up to that. We're going to have to put in money if Russia is really going to consolidate a democracy.

It is rather unusual for Italy to be at the forefront of pro-market initiatives.

Many still believe that conducting political and economic reforms at the same time is not an Asian way. But this is a fairy-tale. We broke that old stereotype by reforming our political, economic and social systems concurrently since 1990.

I think a major cause of present Asian economic difficulties that mainly come from, you know, lack of market economy.

You must keep in mind that Pakistan has suffered the aftermaths of the Cold War, and that Cold War had left deep imprints on our society. We were the worst sufferers from the ills of the Afghan war.

The people in Poland had to deal with painful reforms.

Establishment of a market economy is seen as mostly involving destruction.

For a quarter-century, and changing only very recently, the main IMF prescription has been budgetary belt-tightening for patients much too poor to own belts. IMF led austerity has frequently resulted in riots, coups, and the collapse of public services.

In the transition to a market economy, the status of women are eroding further.

When nations are willing to undertake serious economic reform, we should help them to do it.

With Yeltsin, the Soviet Union broke apart, the country was totally mismanaged, the constitution was not respected by the regions of Russia. The army, education and health systems collapsed. People in the West quietly applauded, dancing with and around Yeltsin. I conclude therefore that we should not pay too much attention to what the West is saying.

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 the 1980s and 1990s, radical change in economic policies fostered by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put the brakes on government planning and ushered in a new free-market supply-side era and a two-decade boom. That model has been abandoned in the new century. This must be reversed.