Because Soyuz members may not find a book about transitional economies of Southeast Asia and China particularly relevant to their interests and expertise in formerly Soviet Eurasia, I restrict most of my review to the parts of Dana's book that address Central Asia. Given the quirky blend of economic theory, advice to governments and would-be investors, official data relating to production and employment, laws regarding property, taxation, ownership, and Dana's impressions and opinions of Asian societies and cultures, it is hard to pinpoint the sort of audience that will profit best from reading this book. Furthermore, since precious few of his sources for Central Asia÷Asia generally÷postdate the dawn of the new millennium, the book already may be seen as out of date.
Dana begins his mission by discussing his early interests in transitional economies and Asia going back to the mid-1980s. He in fact has spent considerable time teaching and researching in places such as Vietnam, China, and Singapore. In reeling off a number of theoretical models of transition to market economies, including The Yugopluralist Model and the Parallel Economy, Dana cautions that any concerted effort to help enable a particular country to achieve at least a modicum of success requires preliminary efforts to grasp key elements of the culture of actors, including common economic activities, a given countryâs government policies, and its particular history. Indeed, there is much seemingly informed and sensitive talk about respecting differences toward transition owing to very different cultural models. Frankly, for the would-be foreign investor, it is hard not to consider this sound advice.
The problem naturally comes in the form of this author's consideration of Danaâs reading of modern Central Asian countries, for here he shows himself to be less a student of the economic changes of transitional economies than an economics travel writer who relies now on a guide's anecdote, now on a particular government's decree about taxation from the sale of homegrown produce. Thus even if we are to give Dana the benefit of the doubt, reasoning that his data and understanding of China and Southeast Asia (Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam that he refers to as former Indochine Francaise) are well informed, experienced social scientists and historians of Central Asia will notice that his slapdash attempt to cover transition in Central Asia weaken what may have been a decent effort to shed light on the economic processes he wishes to illuminate.
Precisely the amateurish and sloppy coverage of Central Asian countries vitiates this author's consideration of adoption of such a text for classroom use. This is a shame because Dana is on to a good idea in wanting to discuss the macroeconomic changes that have led Central Asian countries along their contemporary economic paths. Too, he wants especially non-academic readers to appreciate regional differences in terms of entrepreneurial practices, and, again, this should be encouraged, but what he fails to do convincingly is provide a concise balance of micro- and macro-economic data that would lend explanatory force to his empirical observations.
In addition to being contradicted by obvious facts of Central Asian economic life, Dana manifests a level of ignorance about the Soviet political system that detracts from much of his sound overview of these countriesâ general and not-so-obvious problems. Pertaining to Tajikistan, Dana falls into the hackneyed generalization about people not knowing how to take initiative and manage their own businesses as they are "waiting for directives" (115). Sadly, he tells readers nothing about the vast number of able-bodied Tajik men (liberal estimates of 70%) who work and operate businesses in Russia, forming a vital part of the Tajik economy. While conveniently ignoring modern history, Dana plunges headlong into a discussion of the Tajik Civil War (1992-1997) by asserting the ancient hatreds nonsense. He claims that just as the British held India together and Tito Yugoslavia, the Soviets occupation of Tajikistan kept the old animosities at bay. Odd that a person keen to enlighten would-be investors about the importance of historical knowledge utterly fails to consider who carved out a Tajikistan in the first place and sowed the seeds of future regional antagonisms!
For those of us who have spent years trying to educate students and others about just how intricate and tortuous even the modern history of Eurasian peoples is, this book's sections on Central Asia serve as just one more reminder that a lack of expertise really continues the untoward trend of purveying bad information, making our teaching that much harder and our writing that much more necessary. The two examples I provided for Tajikistan are an indication of further shortcomings in the historical and economic coverage of countries, including Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Whether one's topic is economy or pop music, there is no substitute for lengthy living in any single place to really learn the multi-faceted nature of the topic.
Actually, Dana could have written a much better book on Central Asian transitional economies had he bothered to peruse the literature on the topic that certainly existed by the late 1990s, but a quick review of the sources really shows no such effort. And while one needn't control a large number of foreign research languages to write effectively about transitional economies of Eurasia, it's clear that Dana restricts himself to English.
Despite this book's deficiencies, economically-minded students of Eurasian culture, history, and society will find economists' musings÷as Dana summarizes÷about transitions to market economies stimulating for their own understanding about degrees of success and failure in the wake of socialist state organization. Finally, the comparative perspective (whatever the value of the analyses of these other Asian countries may be) should also give us pause to see where generalizations about transition make more and less sense.