Socialist Economies in Transition provides a coherent critique of economic reform in Eastern Europe which, it is argued, will create not prosperity but high levels of unemployment and severe economic dislocation. The authors show how the application of neo-classical economic theory will, in reality, prove unsuccessful and explain why, despite the revolutionary upheavals of 1989 and the immense effort to discard the restraints of planning, the intuitive mechanisms and practices of the free market have been so slow to appear.