About János Kornai
János Kornai was a Hungarian economist noted for his analysis and criticism of the command economies of Eastern European communist states. He also covered macroeconomic aspects in countries undergoing post-Soviet transition. He was emeritus professor at both Harvard University and Corvinus University of Budapest. Kornai was known to have coined the term shortage economy to reflect perpetual shortages of goods in the centrally-planned command economies of the Eastern Bloc. Professor Kornai's early work Overcentralization (1956) created a stir in the West and conveyed for the first time his disillusionment with communist central planning. He elaborated the theory of two-level planning with Tamás Lipták and directed the first large-scale, economy-wide, multi-level planning project.
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