This program is open to all majors, including day students, college transfers, and graduate students. This is associated with Dr. Trumbull's Spring 2023 courses, outlined below. There will be three classes: ECON 470-01, a face-to-face class for day students, ECON 470-W1, an online class for CTP students, and ECON 750-W1, an online class for graduate students. All will participate in the trip. The classes will begin at the start of the semester with an introduction to economic systems: capitalism, planned socialism, and market socialism. The focus of the class will be primarily the former planned-socialist countries, including Russia, Czechoslovakia (which later split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia), Hungary, and Poland. The students will learn about the implementation of planned socialism in these countries. They will learn what is involved in a transition to capitalism and how transition was implemented in these countries. The students will then go to Poland to see for themselves what they have learned in the classroom. We will have lectures from experts on the transition, perhaps even including Leszek Balcerowicz, the minister of finance and deputy prime minister of the first post-socialist government and author of shock-therapy transition. The trip will also feature visits to firms in Poland to speak with managers/owners about enterprise privatization (one of the most difficult tasks of transition) and doing business in Poland today. After the trip, the students will type up a daily journal that they will be required to write whole in Poland, write a term paper describing transition in a post-socialist country other than Poland, and take a final exam. Part of a regular Spring course on the post-socialist countries of Europe that has a field trip to Poland over spring break. The students will learn about the planned-socialist economic system and how the institutions of planned socialism differ from those of capitalism. The major focus is on the transition to capitalism, which turned out to be extraordinarily difficult. We will consider as case studies transition in Russia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The primary objective is to gain insight into the miracle of the market (capitalist) economy that, where well implemented, works so well even though there is no centralized control by studying the planned-socialist system where there was centralized control and the development of market institutions during transition. Total program fee: $1757.50 Program Deposit $500, due 12/1/22 Final payment, 1257.50, due 1/14/23
Quick Facts
Population: 38415284 Capital: Warsaw Per-capita GDP: $ 20600 Size: 312685 km2 Time Zone: (GMT + 01:00 hour) Brussels, Copenhagen, Madrid, Paris
US State Department
Travel Warning: YES See : Country Specific Info.