Anders Åslund

Anders Åslund
Born	(1952-02-17) 17 February 1952 Karlskoga, Sweden
Nationality	Sweden
Academic career
Field	Economics of Transition
Institution	Atlantic Council
Alma mater	Oxford University (D.Phil.)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Per Anders Åslund (Swedish pronunciation: [ˈânːdɛʂ ˈoːslɵnd]; born 17 February 1952) is a Swedish economist and a Senior Fellow at the Atlantic Council. He is also a chairman of the International Advisory Council at the Center for Social and Economic Research (CASE).

His work focuses on economic transition from centrally planned to market economies. Åslund served as an economic adviser to the governments of Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Ukraine and from 2003 was director of the Russian and Eurasian Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Åslund was an advocate of early, comprehensive, and radical economic reforms in Russia and Eastern Europe. He worked at the Peterson Institute for International Economics from 2006 to 2015. In 2013, David Frum wrote that “Anders Aslund at the Peterson Institute is one of the world’s leading experts on the collapse of the planned Soviet economy.”

Anders Aslund lives permanently in Washington, DC, with his wife Anna and their two children.

Åslund in Sweden

From 1989 to 1994, Åslund worked as a Professor of International Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics; and in 1989 he became the founding director of the Stockholm Institute of East European Economics.

On 22 April 1990 Åslund published a controversial article in the leading Swedish daily, Dagens Nyheter, drawing parallels between the collapsing communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the social democratic policies in Sweden. He argued that Sweden had too large a public sector; supported communist dictatorships, such as Cuba, in the Third World; and had excessive state intervention in all areas of life. The ruling Social Democratic government opposed the views of Åslund in dozens of articles. In June 1990, Social Democratic Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson voiced public disagreement with Åslund in the Swedish parliament. However, opposition leader, Carl Bildt, defended Åslund.

Involvement in Russian economic reform

From November 1991 to January 1994, Åslund worked with Jeffrey Sachs and David Lipton as a senior advisor to the Russian reform government under President Boris Yeltsin and Acting Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar. He worked also with Deputy Prime Ministers Anatoly Chubais and Boris Fedorov. Åslund summarized his views in his book How Russia Became a Market Economy.

Other work

After his experiences in Russia, Åslund worked as an economic advisor to President Leonid Kuchma of Ukraine from 1994 to 1997, and from 1998 to 2004, to President Askar Akaev of Kyrgyzstan. Åslund has also worked substantially with economic policy in the Baltic countries, first as a member of the International Baltic Economic Commission from 1991 to 1993, and later as an informal advisor to Latvian Prime Minister Valdis Dombrovskis from 2009. (Dombrovskis was prime minister until 2014.)

Work in Ukraine

In 2016, Åslund was appointed to the supervisory board of Ukraine's 23rd largest bank, Kredyt Dnipro, owned by Ukrainian billionaire Viktor Pinchuk.

Fallout with the Zelensky Administration

His work in Ukraine made him a vocal critic of Ukrainian President Zelensky. Åslund was a member of the supervisory board of the Ukrainian Railways from June 2018 until September 2020, when he was "fired" by President Zelensky. Zelensky commented on the resignation of UZ Aslund, a member of the supervisory board. He claimed he resigned because Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and members of the Ukrainian parliament "do not believe in good corporate governance." Åslund claimed that the foreign members of the supervisory boards of 13 large state-owned companies "receive only insults and obstacles from the president." In March 2021, through a heated exchange with Zelensky's spokeswoman Iuliia Mendel on Twitter, Aslund charged that Zelensky was owned "by Ukraine's biggest enemy [ Ihor Kolomoisky ]" and that Zelensky's team had done "nothing" for Ukraine. Mendel, in turn, insinuated Aslund felt slighted over his dismissal by Zelensky.

Bibliography

Authored Books

• Private Enterprise in Eastern Europe. The Non-Agricultural Private Sector in Poland and the GDR, 1945–83 Macmillan, London, 1985, 294 pp.
• Gorbachev's Struggle for Economic Reform, Pinter, London, and Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1989, 219 pp. 2nd ed., Pinter, London, and Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1991, 262 pp.
• Post-Communist Economic Revolutions: How Big a Bang? The Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, and Westview, 1992, 106 pp.
• How Russia Became a Market Economy, 1995, ISBN 978-0-8157-0425-6
• Getting It Wrong: Regional Cooperation and the Commonwealth of Independent States, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, D.C., 1999., with Martha Brill Olcott and Sherman W. Garnett,
• Building Capitalism: The Transformation of the Former Soviet Bloc, 2001, ISBN 978-0-521-80525-4
• How Capitalism Was Built: The Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
• Russia's Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed, 2007, ISBN 978-0-88132-409-9
• How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy, 2009, ISBN 0-88132-427-2
• The Russia Balance Sheet, 2009 by Anders Åslund and Andrew Kuchins, ISBN 978-0-88132-424-2
• The Last Shall Be the first: The East European Financial Crisis, 2008–10, 2010, ISBN 978-0-88132-521-8
• How Latvia Came through the Financial Crisis, 2011, by Anders Åslund and Valdis Dombrovskis, ISBN 978-0-88132-602-4
• Ukraine: What Went Wrong and How to Fix It, 2015, ISBN 978-0-88132-701-4
• Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy, 2019, ISBN 978-0-30024-309-3

Edited Books

• Market Socialism or the Restoration of Capitalism?, 1992, ISBN 978-0-52141-193-6
• The Post-Soviet Economy: Soviet and Western Perspectives, 1992, ISBN 978-0-31207-569-9
• Changing the Economic System in Russia, 1993, by Anders Åslund and Richard Layard, ISBN 1-85567-129-8
• Economic Transformation in Russia, 1994, ISBN 978-0-31212-044-3
• Russian Economic Reform at Risk, 1995, ISBN 978-1-85567-286-4
• Sotsialnaya politika v period perekhoda k rynku: problemy i resheniya (Social Policy in the Transition to a Market Economy: Problems and Solutions), 1996 by Anders Åslund and Mikhail Dmitriev, ISBN 978-0-87003-121-2
• Russia's Economic Transformation in the 1990s, 1997, ISBN 978-1-85567-461-5
• Russia After Communism, 1999 by Anders Åslund and Martha Brill Olcott, ISBN 978-0-87003-151-9
• Economic Reform in Ukraine: The Unfinished Agenda, 2000 by Anders Åslund and Georges de Ménil, ISBN 978-0-76560-624-2
• Ocherki o mirovoi ekonomike. Vydayushchiesya ekonomisty mira v Moskovskom Tsentre Carnegie. (Series of Lectures on Economics: Leading World Experts at the Carnegie Moscow Center), 2005 by Anders Åslund and Tatyana Maleva
• Russia Versus the United States and Europe – or "Strategic Triangle"?, 2005 by Anders Åslund and Hannes Adomeit
• Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic Breakthrough, 2006 by Anders Åslund and Michael McFaul, ISBN 978-0-87003-221-9
• The Challenges of Globalization, 2008 by Anders Åslund and Marek Dabrowski, ISBN 978-0-88132-418-1
• Russia After the Global Economic Crisis, 2010 by Anders Åslund, Sergei Guriev, and Andrew Kuchins, ISBN 978-0-88132-497-6
• Europe After Enlargement, 2012 by Anders Åslund and Marek Dabrowski, ISBN 978-1-10741-051-0
• The Great Rebirth: Lessons from the Victory of Capitalism over Communism, 2014 by Anders Åslund and Simeon Djankov, ISBN 978-0-88132-697-0
• Europe’s Growth Challenge, 2017 by Anders Åslund and Simeon Djankov, ISBN 978-0-19049-920-4

External links

• [1] Biography at the Atlantic Council's site
• [2] CV at the CASE Center for Social and Economic Research's site
• Anders Åslund's opinion editorial commentaries for Project Syndicate
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• Russia’s Crony Capitalism: The Path from Market Economy to Kleptocracy on YouTube AtlanticCouncil, streamed live on May 7, 2019