Jeffrey Sachs

From Liberpedia
Jeffrey Sachs seated at the MCC Budapest Peace Forum
Jeffrey Sachs in 2023. Photo: Elekes Andor, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Jeffrey D. Sachs is an American economist known for advising governments on inflation, debt and the transition from central planning to a market economy, notably in Bolivia, Poland and Russia. His economic record needs to be assessed by distinguishing his recommendations, the policies actually implemented, and their consequences. He is also a commentator on Russia’s war against Ukraine, particularly NATO expansion and Euromaidan.[1]

Economic reforms: what was being proposed?

The label shock therapy bundles together different policies: stopping the monetary financing of government deficits; freeing prices and trade; making currencies convertible; allowing new private businesses; transferring state enterprises into private ownership; and obtaining foreign financial support and debt relief. These measures can be evaluated separately. Ending a price control is a different act from raising a tax, distributing ownership titles or lending taxpayers’ money to another government.

Sachs’s stated model for Poland was the capitalism of Western Europe, rather than an Austrian or consistently libertarian system. His retrospective account distinguished immediate financial stabilization from the slower development of commercial institutions and the much longer restructuring of production. He acknowledged that changing the economic system could not instantly undo decades of misallocated investment.[2]

Libertarian and Austrian criteria

Austrian economics and libertarian political theory raise related but distinct questions. The economic question is whether a measure allows prices, ownership, entrepreneurship and profit and loss to coordinate production. The ethical question is whether it respects property and voluntary exchange. A beneficial economic result does not, by itself, justify taxation, confiscation or political favoritism; objections to those methods do not make their useful results disappear.

Hayek’s argument about dispersed knowledge supports freeing prices and decisions that central planners cannot coordinate from a single office. Applied to transition, however, it also warns against assuming that an adviser can design the eventual pattern of firms, investment and employment. Liberalization gives people opportunities to discover better uses of resources; it does not give a ministry the knowledge needed to allocate those resources correctly.[3]

Rothbard’s 1992 proposal for desocialization illustrates why the Austrian objection cannot simply be that reforms were too fast. He favored rapid abolition of controls and secure private ownership, but opposed higher taxation, confiscation of money, and arrangements that merely perpetuated state ownership under new names. He gave priority to restitution where identifiable owners existed and proposed other transfers where they did not. He also sought to end central banking and state money creation, which goes much further than stabilizing a government currency through an exchange-rate peg. His prescriptions were a particular libertarian position, rather than a description of everything subsequently called privatization.[4]

On these criteria, removing price controls, legalizing enterprise, opening trade and ending inflationary subsidies were defensible directions. Wage controls, punitive wage taxes, political allocation of assets and foreign-government financing require separate criticism. A government cannot demonstrate that it has created a free market merely by calling its chosen owners “private”. Nor does a stabilization fund financed by foreign taxpayers become voluntary assistance because the recipient government uses it effectively.

Debt relief also differs from new official lending. Rothbard argued that public debt pledges future taxpayers’ resources rather than the personal property of the politicians contracting it, and therefore defended repudiation of public debt. That position can support freeing citizens from inherited state obligations while opposing a new taxpayer-financed bailout. It is a reason to assess Sachs’s debt-relief proposals separately from his requests for fresh government loans, rather than treating the whole financial package as either libertarian or anti-libertarian.[5]

Austrian criticism of the Russian transition also extends beyond defending the word capitalism. Peter Boettke, Rosolino Candela and Konstantin Zhukov argue that insecure property rights and a state dispensing monopoly privileges persisted across the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. They distinguish trading around a predatory state from paying its officials to obtain advantages in the name of privatization. Their argument concerns the institutions governing exchange, rather than treating every transfer into nominally private hands as market liberalization.[6]

In a later interview, Boettke favorably discussed Sachs’s argument for opening trade and ownership to outside investors, because such entry can bring knowledge and organizational practices as well as goods and capital. Agreement on that mechanism is compatible with criticism of politically allocated ownership. Calling Sachs ultra-liberal therefore obscures the policy choices that need assessment: market opening, monetary stabilization, government financing and the administrative design of privatization were distinct parts of his approach.[7]

Bolivia: successful stabilization, with other costs and constraints

Sachs advised Bolivia from 1985 during the government’s struggle with hyperinflation and foreign debt. The program introduced in August 1985 sharply changed fiscal and monetary policy and liberalized economic activity. Its success in stopping hyperinflation was substantial: Juan Antonio Morales reported December-to-December inflation of 10.6 percent in 1987.[8][9]

The package was not simply the withdrawal of government. It also included higher fuel taxation, a public-sector wage freeze, employment cuts and continued suspension of foreign debt payments. These features matter when deciding whether to describe the entire program as libertarian. Ending money creation and removing price restrictions can be credited without endorsing every fiscal or administrative instrument used alongside them.[10]

There were serious adjustment costs, particularly in mining. The collapse of the international tin market in October 1985 occurred after the stabilization began and compounded the problems of high-cost Bolivian production. Morales’s subsequent study documented large employment losses in mining and different adjustment paths across sectors.[11]

Poland: a costly transition followed by sustained recovery

Sachs and David Lipton advised Solidarity and the Polish government, but the reforms introduced in January 1990 were the responsibility of Polish political leaders, especially Leszek Balcerowicz. Their program combined price and trade liberalization with tighter financial policy, a temporary exchange-rate anchor and a tax-based restraint on enterprise wages. Lipton and Sachs defended the wage restraint partly because state enterprises lacked private owners imposing financial discipline. That explanation does not make the restraint a market wage-setting mechanism.[12]

The ownership proposals were also more specific than an instruction to sell everything to the highest bidder. In their 1990 privatization paper, Lipton and Sachs proposed share allocations including about 20 percent to capitalize pension funds, 10 percent for banks and insurance institutions, and 20 percent for the adult population, alongside employee and management allocations. Financial intermediaries were expected to supervise enterprises.[13]

Foreign backing was part of the Polish program. Thirteen industrial countries made a $1 billion currency stabilization fund available, and creditor governments provided debt relief. The IMF’s history records that Poland never drew on the stabilization fund; its availability was intended to support confidence in the currency.[14]

The immediate results included a severe recorded recession and rising unemployment, alongside the end of shortages and a sharp reduction in inflation. The IMF’s 1994 account reported real GDP declines of 11.6 percent in 1990 and 7.6 percent in 1991, followed by positive growth in 1992. It reported annual-average consumer-price inflation falling from 585.8 percent in 1990 to 70.3 percent in 1991 and 35.3 percent in 1993. These figures belong to that contemporary statistical assessment; transition data were subsequently revised and are not perfectly comparable with measurements of the old shortage economy.[15]

By 1996 Poland had experienced five consecutive years of growth. The IMF’s contemporary review credited the continuity of market-oriented policy and financial stabilization across successive governments, while emphasizing high unemployment, regional disparities and substantial social costs.[16]

The practical verdict is broadly favorable to Poland’s move toward markets, with real costs and disputed choices within the package. A comparison with feasible alternatives must account for the shortages and distortions inherited from central planning, as well as initial conditions, domestic entrepreneurship, institutions, access to Western markets and subsequent policy. The speed of the initial reforms alone cannot explain the difference between Poland and Russia.

Russia: failed stabilization, insider transfers and limits to attribution

Sachs advised the Soviet/Russian reform effort in the early 1990s and left the Russian advisory role by January 1994. In later accounts he emphasized his macroeconomic role and his unsuccessful advocacy of a large Western support package. He also denied advising the voucher privatization program or the later loans-for-shares transactions.[17]

His 1992 paper with Lipton explicitly endorsed the government’s mass-privatization strategy and described its proposed distribution of shares to workers and managers, voucher auctions and cash sales. Their expectation that this would improve corporate governance deserves scrutiny in light of subsequent insider control. The later loans-for-shares program was introduced in 1995, after his departure.[18][19]

Sachs’s own May 1992 article supplies a more detailed prescription. He proposed converting large enterprises into joint-stock companies together, allocating an initial share tranche to workers and managers, and requiring supervisory boards to privatize enough further equity to establish private majority ownership. The government would set disclosure and conflict-of-interest rules and could retain a veto over some transactions. He also envisaged an interim state minority stake, municipal auctions for shops, concessional worker-management buyouts for smaller firms and early commercialization and privatization of banks. These proposals combined rapid ownership transfer with a substantial administrative framework.[20]

In his 1993 comments on Boycko, Shleifer and Vishny’s account, Sachs explicitly described himself as an early adviser on privatization. He defended “speed above perfection” in allocating shares, accepting heavy insider ownership as a political cost of establishing private property quickly. He also warned that formal ownership transfer had not yet demonstrated successful restructuring and that entrenched managers resisted competition.[21]

Russia did not implement a consistent program of hard budget constraints and monetary stabilization in 1992–1993. Enterprises continued to receive large subsidies and directed credits. An IMF study found that the relaxation of credit restrictions and renewed central-bank financing in 1992 accelerated inflation. This is a serious problem with the familiar description of the entire early transition as an experiment in unrelenting “tight money”: announced stabilization, brief restrictions, reversals and later stabilization efforts are different episodes.[22]

Russia suffered a severe economic and social collapse. An IMF study of output estimated average annual contraction of 6.3 percent over 1989–1998 and examined the disruption of planned production networks, underused capital and subsequent sectoral reallocation. The World Bank’s 1996 report documented a sharp fall in Russian life expectancy during the early transition.[23][24]

How much of that disaster particular reforms caused is contested. Stuckler, King and McKee associated mass privatization with increased working-age male mortality across post-communist countries. Earle and Gehlbach challenged the robustness of that relationship and found no supporting effect in their analysis of Russian regions.[25][26]

Household evidence confirms that the social deterioration included increased poverty. Klugman and Braithwaite’s analysis of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey reported the share of individuals below its expenditure-based poverty line rising from 26.8 percent in 1992 to 41.1 percent in 1995. The corresponding household shares were lower, because poor households tended to be larger. These are estimates under that study’s method during the early transition, not directly interchangeable with Soviet official figures or every later poverty series.[27]

Nor was Western financial assistance wholly absent. In April 1995 the IMF approved a roughly $6.8 billion stand-by credit, and its announcement recorded about $4.5 billion of existing outstanding IMF credit. The IMF’s history also confirms the narrower point that the proposed $6 billion ruble stabilization fund never materialized.[14] Whether the timing, scale, form and conditions of support were appropriate is a different question from whether Russia received any assistance. The failure to provide the fund supports part of Sachs’s criticism, but does not establish that his preferred package would have prevented the collapse.[28]

How oligarchic fortunes were built

The voucher program and the later loans-for-shares deals were different mechanisms. The earlier program combined vouchers distributed to citizens with preferential allocations to enterprise insiders. A widely chosen option gave workers and managers together 51 percent of voting equity at a price linked to old book values. Managers could buy further shares from employees, while investors accumulated tradable vouchers and used them to obtain large blocks of company shares. The program’s own advisers described these routes to concentrated ownership in 1993.[21]

Loans-for-shares in 1995 added a more direct connection between state finance, political favor and valuable resource companies. Banks lent money to the government against company stakes; the arrangements led to transfers of those stakes when the loans were not repaid. In his account based on research for The Oligarchs, David Hoffman described the Menatep group’s role in the Yukos auctions as a conflict in which the auction organizer also arranged the winning bid through a related company, while outsiders were excluded. This was access to an existing oil business through a politically managed transaction, rather than a fortune earned solely by launching a new product.[29][19]

An individual’s estimated fortune is the value of the assets or shares he owns, not a measurement of what he personally invented. Taking control of an existing resource company transfers claims to its production, reserves and future earnings; subsequent price increases can greatly enlarge the owner’s paper wealth. Inventing something used by millions is one route to wealth, not the only one. The relevant questions are how the title was acquired, whether competitors were excluded, and how much subsequent value came from investment and better management rather than privileged acquisition or asset extraction.

Guriev and Rachinsky’s firm-level study found oligarch-controlled companies performing more efficiently than other Russian owners’ firms after controls for industry, region and size. Those operational improvements are distinct from the legitimacy of the original asset transfers and the treatment of minority shareholders.[30]

For a libertarian assessment, transfers to politically connected insiders cannot be equated with secure, generally accessible property rights and competitive entry. The Russian experience requires criticism of the actual allocation of assets, monetary policy and institutions, together with scrutiny of reformers’ expectations.

What changed under Putin?

Russia’s recovery began before Putin became president. Ahrend’s 2004 OECD study reported real GDP growth of 6.3 percent in 1999. It identified the competitiveness gains following the 1998 devaluation, subsequent oil-sector expansion and prudent fiscal policy as important parts of the recovery. The early Putin period also included genuine tax changes: a 13 percent personal income-tax rate, a reduction of the profit-tax rate from 35 to 24 percent, and abolition of turnover taxes. The study emphasized the contribution of privately owned oil producers.[31]

The early recovery also improved household living standards. Using a separate consumption-based method and regionally adjusted poverty lines, the World Bank estimated poverty at 24.1 percent in 1997, 41.5 percent in 1999 and 19.6 percent in 2002. The decline after 1999 was substantial. These estimates must be kept separate from the earlier RLMS series and from the official subsistence-minimum series, which produced different levels.[32]

The political change was a stronger Kremlin deciding which large owners could retain influence and assets. Hoffman warned in 2004 that the attack on Khodorkovsky and pressure on independent political and media power were consolidating state control, rather than establishing rules applied equally to everyone. Displacing some Yeltsin-era oligarchs did not by itself eliminate politically privileged ownership.[29]

Yukos illustrates the Kremlin’s use of state power to transfer valuable private assets into state ownership. In 2014 the Energy Charter tribunal in Hulley Enterprises v. Russia found that Russia’s objective was to bankrupt Yukos and appropriate valuable assets; it also found the auction of Yuganskneftegaz, subsequently acquired by state-owned Rosneft, rigged. The European Court of Human Rights’ separate 2011 company judgment found procedural and property-rights violations, including disproportionate enforcement, but did not find the alleged improper purpose established under Article 18.[33][34]

The libertarian issue therefore survives the change of rulers: property should be secure against both insider appropriation and selective state confiscation. Real growth and useful tax reforms do not make political control of ownership legitimate; abuses by earlier owners do not establish that transferring their assets to state companies created a free economy.

NATO expansion and Euromaidan

Sachs’s claims

In The Ninth Anniversary of the Ukraine War (2023), Sachs presented the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovych as a US-backed coup serving NATO enlargement. He treated assurances given to Soviet leaders in 1990 as a prohibition on later enlargement. In the same article he described Russia’s 2022 invasion as wrong and called for Russian withdrawal.[35]

These are continuing positions. In the transcript published on his website of his Brussels speech on 14 October 2026, Sachs again portrayed Maidan as a US regime-change operation linked to NATO enlargement, and associated approximately $5 billion of US spending with bringing it about.[36]

Assurances, alliance choices and the chronology of aggression

The documentary record does contain Western assurances to Soviet leaders in 1990, including Baker’s statement about NATO’s jurisdiction not moving eastward. But political assurances during the German-unification negotiations, the final treaty provisions and a permanent Russian right to decide other countries’ alliances are different propositions.[37]

The final German settlement imposed specific deployment restrictions in the former East Germany and preserved united Germany’s right to belong to alliances. It did not establish a general ban on future Eastern European membership. In the 1997 NATO–Russia Founding Act, Russia and NATO affirmed states’ right to choose their security arrangements and expressly excluded a veto over the other’s decisions. These later commitments matter alongside the earlier assurances.[38][39]

NATO’s 2008 Bucharest declaration did promise future membership to Ukraine and Georgia. Yet Ukraine’s 2010–2014 policy was non-alignment, and the formal abandonment of non-bloc status came in December 2014, after Russia had seized Crimea and the war in the Donbas had begun. Military cooperation and a possible future membership are not the same as membership, and changes made after an invasion cannot explain that invasion in the same way as a prior action.[40][41]

The NATO explanation for the invasion cannot be established merely by repeating Moscow’s objections. A libertarian criticism of Western military policy also gives no Russian government a property right over neighboring populations or a license to annex their territory.

Maidan: domestic protests, the parliamentary vote and elections

The Euromaidan protesters demanded European association and an end to police repression. In the Democratic Initiatives Foundation and KIIS survey of 1,037 participants on 7–8 December 2013, 70 percent cited the beating of demonstrators and repression, and 53.5 percent cited Yanukovych’s refusal to sign the EU association agreement; 71 percent supported signing the association agreement, and respondents could give several reasons. The survey documents the protesters’ own reasons for mobilizing against Yanukovych; its sample was the demonstrators, rather than the Ukrainian electorate as a whole.[42]

The $5 billion claim is especially misleading without its time period. Nuland’s December 2013 statement referred to cumulative US assistance since Ukraine’s independence in 1991. A contemporaneous State Department explanation described economic modernization, judicial reform, customs, border services and other programs. It was not an accounting of $5 billion spent organizing the 2013–2014 protests. Treating this cumulative assistance as a protest budget changes both its period and its purpose.[43]

The Nuland–Pyatt call: a government under Yanukovych

The Nuland–Pyatt call concerned Yanukovych’s own proposal for a government under his presidency. On 25 January 2014, he offered Arseniy Yatsenyuk the premiership and Vitali Klitschko the deputy premiership for humanitarian affairs.[44][45]

Yatsenyuk refused the offer; the January arrangement never took office. He became prime minister only on 27 February 2014, under acting president Oleksandr Turchynov.[46][47]

See the detailed comparison of the call and subsequent events for the proposed roles, actual office-holders, full parliamentary vote tallies and the contrast between Nuland’s EU remark and the pro-European protests.

Parliamentary votes and subsequent elections

On 22 February 2014, the Ukrainian parliament declared that Yanukovych had abandoned his constitutional duties and called an early presidential election for 25 May. The resolution passed with 328 votes in favor, none against and no abstentions: unanimity among the deputies who cast a vote. Six registered deputies did not vote. The 328 votes amounted to 72.9 percent of the constitutional 450-seat parliament.[48]

Ukrainian voters then chose a president in the 25 May 2014 presidential election. Petro Poroshenko won in the first round with 54.70 percent of the vote, ahead of Yulia Tymoshenko on 12.81 percent. Yanukovych’s Party of Regions had not been banned: it backed Mykhailo Dobkin, who stood in the election and received 3.03 percent. His political camp could compete for the presidency, and voters rejected its candidate.[49]

The 26 October 2014 parliamentary election renewed the legislature as well. The People’s Front led the party-list vote with 22.14 percent, followed by the Petro Poroshenko Bloc on 21.82 percent. The Party of Regions did not field a party list, but politicians formerly affiliated with it stood as independents or for other parties, principally the Opposition Bloc and Strong Ukraine. The Opposition Bloc received 9.43 percent of the party-list vote and won 29 seats. Former members of Yanukovych’s governing party therefore continued to contest elections and sit in parliament.[50][51]

The OSCE-led observers assessed the presidential election as genuine and largely consistent with international commitments. For the parliamentary election they credited competitive contests offering voters real choice and general respect for fundamental freedoms. Russia’s occupation of Crimea and armed violence in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk prevented polling there; observers also recorded campaign violence and problems with some parliamentary vote tabulations. By 26 October 2014, Ukrainians had chosen both a president and a new parliament in competitive elections that included his former political allies. This electoral record directly contradicts the portrayal of post-Maidan Ukraine as a US-appointed regime that displaced Ukrainians’ political choice.[52][51]

In March 2014, Sachs described a mass uprising against a corrupt government, called Russia’s occupation of Crimea illegal, and characterized Russian claims of a fascist takeover as hyperbole. At his Kyiv briefing on 7 April he identified Russian hostility and the military threat as obstacles to Ukrainian recovery, and supported rapid financial assistance. His contemporary description of a mass uprising against a corrupt government contrasts sharply with his later presentation of Maidan as a US regime-change operation.[53][54]

The economists’ open letter

The open letter published by VoxUkraine on 20 March 2023 challenges five recurring features of Sachs’s argument: denying Ukrainian agency; presenting NATO as the source of Russian aggression; treating Ukrainian territory as disposable; accepting Russian peace proposals without credible safeguards; and dividing Ukraine into supposedly opposed ethnic blocs. Its criticism connects Euromaidan to NATO enlargement by asking whose choices disappear when the story is told only through Washington and Moscow.[55]

Pivot published a French translation on 25 March with an additional editorial introduction. Its opening assessment of Sachs’s shock-therapy record should therefore be distinguished from the economists’ letter itself, and from the country-specific evidence on reform presented above.[56]

Assessment

Sachs’s record contains useful stabilization advice, support for market opening, disputed institutional prescriptions and predictions that proved too optimistic. Bolivia’s disinflation and Poland’s recovery were real achievements. Russia experienced severe economic and social collapse while privatization coexisted with continued monetary financing and insider control. Sachs’s published proposals and endorsements establish his involvement in the privatization debate, alongside the limits of his advisory role and the policies actually implemented.

The connection with Ukraine is principally a question of agency and evidence. In the Polish transition, Sachs recognized the wish of people emerging from Soviet domination to integrate with Western Europe. Ukrainians’ reasons for seeking European integration and resisting their own government must receive the same attention. Neither an economic adviser nor a great power can substitute its preferred arrangement for an account of what those people wanted and did.

Economic expertise does not establish the truth of claims about covert operations. Opposition to coercion and intervention should apply to Washington, Moscow and Kyiv alike. That standard permits criticism of Western aid, NATO policy and Ukrainian governments while rejecting the unsupported leap from those criticisms to a US-created Maidan or an inevitable Russian invasion.

References

  1. ↑ Jeffrey D. Sachs, Curriculum vitae, December 2022, government advisory appointments.
  2. ↑ Jeffrey Sachs, Shock Therapy in Poland: Perspectives of Five Years, Tanner Lectures, University of Utah, 1994, especially “The Contents of Shock Therapy.”
  3. ↑ Friedrich A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, American Economic Review 35(4), 1945, pp. 519–530.
  4. ↑ Murray N. Rothbard, How and How Not to Desocialize, originally published in The Review of Austrian Economics, 1992.
  5. ↑ Murray N. Rothbard, Repudiating the National Debt, originally published in Chronicles, June 1992.
  6. ↑ Peter J. Boettke, Rosolino A. Candela and Konstantin Zhukov, The Morality of Illicit Markets: “Greasing the Wheels” or “Greasing the Palm”?, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2023; authors’ summary and publication link.
  7. ↑ Peter Boettke, How Liberty Made Progress Possible, Human Progress Podcast, episode 68, transcript, discussion of post-socialist transition and Sachs’s argument for openness.
  8. ↑ Juan Antonio Morales, The End of the Bolivian Hyperinflation, IISEC working paper, 1988.
  9. ↑ Jeffrey Sachs, The Bolivian Hyperinflation and Stabilization, NBER Working Paper 2073, 1986.
  10. ↑ Andrés Solimano, Inflation and the Costs of Stabilization: Historical and Recent Experiences and Policy Lessons, World Bank Research Observer 5(2), July 1990, discussion of Bolivia.
  11. ↑ Juan Antonio Morales, Bolivia’s Tin and Natural Gas Crises of 1985–1989, IISEC Working Paper 04/92, 1992, especially the employment and trade-shock analysis.
  12. ↑ David Lipton and Jeffrey Sachs, Creating a Market Economy in Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1990(1), especially pp. 113–115 and 127–133.
  13. ↑ David Lipton and Jeffrey Sachs, Privatization in Eastern Europe: The Case of Poland, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1990(2), pp. 328–330.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 James M. Boughton, Many Borrowers; How Many Sizes? IMF Lending and Program Design, in Tearing Down Walls: The International Monetary Fund 1990–1999, 2012, pp. 237–238; IMF, Poland’s Transition to the Market: An Overview, discussion of external support.
  15. ↑ IMF, Poland: Overview, 1994, Table 1–1 and discussion of stabilization.
  16. ↑ IMF, Poland: Recent Economic Developments, 1997, opening assessment of the transition record.
  17. ↑ Jeffrey Sachs, Sachs: “On Ukraine, Joe Biden doesn’t want to compromise”, 2022 interview, answers concerning his Russian advisory role and privatization; see also his The Dismal Decade: Failure East and West, 1998, dating his advisory role from November 1991 to January 1994.
  18. ↑ David Lipton and Jeffrey D. Sachs, Prospects for Russia’s Economic Reforms, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1992(2), especially pp. 219 and 229–231.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 IMF, Russian Federation: Recent Economic Developments, 1997, account of mass privatization and the 1995 loans-for-shares program.
  20. ↑ Jeffrey D. Sachs, Privatization in Russia: Some Lessons from Eastern Europe, American Economic Review 82(2), May 1992, pp. 43–48, especially pp. 46–47; author’s copy.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Maxim Boycko, Andrei Shleifer and Robert W. Vishny, Privatizing Russia, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1993(2), pp. 139–192; program design and insider ownership, pp. 149–155 and 170; Jeffrey Sachs’s comments, pp. 184–188, especially pp. 185–186.
  22. ↑ IMF, Evolution of Monetary Policy Instruments in Russia, Working Paper 97/180, 1997, especially the account of monetary policy in 1992.
  23. ↑ IMF, Russia’s Output Collapse and Recovery, Working Paper 10/89, 2010.
  24. ↑ World Bank, World Development Report 1996: From Plan to Market, discussion of health and mortality during transition.
  25. ↑ David Stuckler, Lawrence King and Martin McKee, Mass Privatisation and the Post-Communist Mortality Crisis: A Cross-National Analysis, The Lancet 373, 2009, pp. 399–407.
  26. ↑ John S. Earle and Scott Gehlbach, Mass Privatisation and the Post-Communist Mortality Crisis: Is There Really a Relationship?, Upjohn Institute Working Paper 10-162, 2010.
  27. ↑ Jeni Klugman and Jeanine Braithwaite, Poverty in Russia during the Transition: An Overview, World Bank Research Observer 13(1), February 1998, pp. 37–58, Table 3 and discussion of the RLMS.
  28. ↑ IMF, IMF Approves Stand-by Credit for Russia, Press Release 95/21, 11 April 1995.
  29. ↑ 29.0 29.1 David E. Hoffman, The Oligarchs: Wealth and Power in the New Russia, Carnegie Council, 21 January 2004, transcript, discussion of voucher privatization, loans-for-shares, Yukos and the emerging Putin system.
  30. ↑ Sergei Guriev and Andrei Rachinsky, The Role of Oligarchs in Russian Capitalism, Journal of Economic Perspectives 19(1), 2005, pp. 131–150.
  31. ↑ Rudiger Ahrend, Accounting for Russia’s Post-Crisis Growth, OECD Economics Department Working Paper 404, 30 September 2004, Table 2, Box 4 and discussion of fiscal policy and privately controlled oil companies.
  32. ↑ World Bank, Reducing Poverty through Growth and Social Policy Reform in Russia, 2006, Tables 1.5, 6.2 and 6.3; recommended methodology based on household consumption.
  33. ↑ Hulley Enterprises Limited v. Russian Federation, PCA Case AA 226, Final Award, 18 July 2014, paragraphs 756 and 1036–1037; primary award reproduced by Arbitration Law.
  34. ↑ European Court of Human Rights, OAO Neftyanaya Kompaniya Yukos v. Russia, application 14902/04, judgment of 20 September 2011, final 8 March 2012, especially paragraphs 657–666 and the operative provisions.
  35. ↑ Jeffrey D. Sachs, The Ninth Anniversary of the Ukraine War, February 2023.
  36. ↑ Jeffrey D. Sachs, Jeffrey D. Sachs at the European Parliament, Brussels, 14 October 2026 (Transcript), sections “NATO Expansion” and “What Happened in Ukraine in 2014.”
  37. ↑ Record of the Gorbachev–Baker conversation, 9 February 1990, Gorbachev Foundation archive, translation published by the National Security Archive; see also the accompanying documentary collection.
  38. ↑ Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany, 12 September 1990, Articles 5–6; English text.
  39. ↑ NATO–Russia Founding Act, 27 May 1997, principles and provisions concerning independent decision-making.
  40. ↑ Bucharest Summit Declaration, 3 April 2008, paragraph 23.
  41. ↑ NATO, Lisbon Summit Declaration, 20 November 2010, paragraph 22, respecting Ukraine’s non-bloc policy; Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Plenary meeting on December 23, 2014, adoption of the legislation abandoning non-aligned status.
  42. ↑ Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation and Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, Maidan-2013, 10 December 2013.
  43. ↑ Victoria Nuland, Remarks at the U.S.–Ukraine Foundation Conference, 13 December 2013; US State Department, U.S. Assistance for Ukraine’s European Integration, same date.
  44. ↑ Justice Minister Olena Lukash’s announcement of the president’s offer, reported in Yanukovych offers premier’s post to Yatseniuk, Interfax-Ukraine, 25 January 2014; Ukrainian report reproducing her statement, Ukrainska Pravda, same date.
  45. ↑ Ukraine crisis: Transcript of leaked Nuland–Pyatt call, BBC News, February 2014 (accessible reproduction); the speakers’ exchanges, distinct from the accompanying commentary.
  46. ↑ Olena Lukash’s statement after the 27 January talks, reported in Parliament will probe into government’s responsibility, Yatseniuk not ready to head cabinet, Interfax-Ukraine, 28 January 2014; Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, Mykola Azarov introduces Serhiy Arbuzov as acting Prime Minister, 29 January 2014. See also Yatsenyuk’s public rejection of the offer on 16 February, reported in Yatsenyuk’s statement rejecting Yanukovych’s offer, Interfax-Ukraine, 17 February 2014.
  47. ↑ Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Plenary meeting on February 23, 2014, vote assigning presidential duties to the parliamentary chairman; Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, Prime Minister of Ukraine and composition of Government appointed, 27 February 2014, parliamentary votes and full government composition. Official roll calls: Yatsenyuk’s appointment, 27 February 2014, 14:50:41; Turchynov’s presidential duties, 23 February 2014, 12:36:42.
  48. ↑ Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Resolution on the President’s self-withdrawal and early presidential elections, 22 February 2014, No. 757-VII; full resolution; official voting record, 22 February 2014, 17:11:55. For the constitutional composition of parliament, see the OSCE/ODIHR October 2014 election report, section IV.
  49. ↑ Central Election Commission of Ukraine, Official notification of the results of the 25 May 2014 presidential election, published in Uryadovyi Kurier; Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Observation of the early presidential election in Ukraine (25 May 2014), Doc. 13543, especially paragraph 38 on Dobkin’s support from the Party of Regions.
  50. ↑ Central Election Commission of Ukraine, Results of the nationwide party-list vote, 26 October 2014; Inter-Parliamentary Union, Ukraine: parliamentary elections of 26 October 2014, election results and party composition.
  51. ↑ 51.0 51.1 OSCE/ODIHR, Ukraine: Early Parliamentary Elections, 26 October 2014, Final Report, 19 December 2014, executive summary and sections III–IV; English report.
  52. ↑ OSCE/ODIHR, Despite Violence and Threats in East, Ukraine Election Characterized by High Turnout and Resolve to Guarantee Fundamental Freedoms, 26 May 2014; final report, 30 June 2014.
  53. ↑ Jeffrey Sachs, A New Post-Soviet Playbook: Why the West Should Tread Carefully in Ukraine, Foreign Affairs, 4 March 2014, author’s copy.
  54. ↑ Ukraine Crisis Media Center, Jeffrey D. Sachs: Ukraine’s Long-Term Structural Challenge Is Achieving Economic Growth in the Face of Russian Hostility, report and video of his 7 April 2014 briefing.
  55. ↑ Open Letter to Jeffrey Sachs on His Position Regarding Russian War on Ukraine, VoxUkraine, 20 March 2023.
  56. ↑ Lettre ouverte à Jeffrey Sachs sur sa position sur l’invasion de l’Ukraine par la Russie, Pivot, 25 March 2023, introduction and French translation of the VoxUkraine letter.


Further reading and recordings

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