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Events • November 15, 2019 

# Liberalism, Authoritarianism, and Good and Bad Transitions 

Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the transition experience of ex-socialist countries toward the market has been varied, with cases of successful economic and political reforms and cases of reform failure. Leszek Balcerowicz will explain how free-market economies based on the rule of law perform incomparably better than centrally planned economies, but, as he will also point out, that they can be undermined by constant pressure from illiberal interest groups, as is the case in many overregulated or fiscally fragile Western countries. Drawing from these experiences, he will discuss how various institutional regimes produce good and bad transitions, including more-recent ones toward authoritarianism.

[![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) 
This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/). 

##### Featuring 

##### Leszek Balcerowicz 

[![Ian Vásquez](/sites/cato.org/files/styles/author_picture/public/2021-01/Ian%20Vasquez.jpg?itok=yBS_mzpm)](/people/ian-vasquez) 

##### [Ian Vásquez](/people/ian-vasquez)

Vice President for International Studies, Cato Institute

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](https://x.com/vasquezian) [ 

](mailto:ivasquez@cato.org)