Public Attitudes to Economic Policy in East and West: Efficiency, Subsidies and Public Ownership

During the last two decades of the 20th century, the predominant opinion among elites in most Western nations has been that market economies, competition, free trade, and minimal government regulation are more efficient than government ownership of the economy. Throughout the West government policy has steadily shifted toward freeing market forces within nations and the globalization of trade between nations; changes in Eastern Europe have been even more dramatic. But it is by no means clear that the Western public accepts the elite's views. It is even less clear what the general public in Eastern Europe - raised under Communism and exposed to widespread disruption and economic decline in the years following its collapse - thinks. I address these issues with extensive survey data from large, representative national samples in Australia, Finland, Poland, and Bulgaria. I find that by the mid-1990s the general public in both East and West were convinced that private enterprise is much more efficient than government-owned firms, although the East remained more sympathetic to government ownership. In all four nations, the educational elite were more persuaded of the virtues of the market than were their less-educated peers. In all four nations, support for government ownership depended on positive evaluations of the economic efficiency of government enterprises to roughly the same degree. It also depended on the desirability of consumer subsidies and the desirability of job protection. Here, the public in both East and West departed from the prevailing dogma of economic liberalism.