Priests of Prosperity explores the unsung revolutionary campaign to transform postcommunist central banks from command-economy cash cows into Western-style monetary guardians. Juliet Johnson conducted more than 160 interviews in seventeen countries with central bankers, international assistance providers, policymakers, and private-sector finance professionals over the course of fifteen years. She argues that a powerful transnational central banking community concentrated in Western Europe and North America integrated postcommunist central bankers into its network, shaped their ideas about the role of central banks, and helped them develop modern tools of central banking.
Johnson’s detailed comparative studies of central bank development in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan take readers from the birth of the campaign in the late 1980s to the challenges faced by central bankers after the global financial crisis. As the comfortable certainties of the past collapse around them, today’s central bankers in the postcommunist world and beyond find themselves torn between allegiance to their transnational community and its principles on the one hand and their increasingly complex and politicized national roles on the other. Priests of Prosperity will appeal to a diverse audience of scholars in political science, finance, economics, geography, and sociology as well as to central bankers and other policymakers interested in the future of international finance, global governance, and economic development.
Juliet Johnson is Professor of Political Science at McGill University. She is the author of A Fistful of Rubles: The Rise and Fall of the Russian Banking System and former editor of the Review of International Political Economy (2007–2014).
Table of Contents
Preface Notes on Nomenclature 1. E Pluribus Unum 2. Transplantation 3. Choosing Independence 4. The Transformation Campaign 5. The Politics of European Integration 6. The Trials of Post-Soviet Central Bankers 7. Paradise Lost
What People are Saying About This
Rawi Abdelal
The work of a mature scholar whose voice is distinctive and compelling, Priests of Prosperity is elegantly and persuasively written. The contributions of this book to comparative and international political economy are substantive and theoretical, and the primary research that informs Juliet Johnson's analysis is impressive and astonishingly thorough. Johnson's argument that a transnational community of central bankers exerted significant, decisive, and surprising influence on the trajectory of central banking practices in postcommunist states is well supported by the evidence. The historical narratives are fantastic.
William Tompson
Priests of Prosperity casts light on a vitally important but understudied aspect of postcommunist transition: the role of Western central banks and international institutions in the creation of monetary and financial systems in the postcommunist world. For better or worse—and often for both—the transnational central banking community's efforts to guide their postcommunist colleagues count as a remarkably speedy and comprehensive example of policy transfer, implanting ideas as well as institutions. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and a wealth of other evidence, Johnson argues that the hands-on efforts of central bankers and experts from outside the region played a critical role in the successes and failures of transition countries in constituting stable, functioning monetary and financial systems.
William TompsonOECD
"Priests of Prosperity casts light on a vitally important but understudied aspect of postcommunist transition: the role of Western central banks and international institutions in the creation of monetary and financial systems in the postcommunist world. For better or worse—and often for both—the transnational central banking community's efforts to guide their postcommunist colleagues count as a remarkably speedy and comprehensive example of policy transfer, implanting ideas as well as institutions. Drawing on hundreds of interviews and a wealth of other evidence, Johnson argues that the hands-on efforts of central bankers and experts from outside the region played a critical role in the successes and failures of transition countries in constituting stable, functioning monetary and financial systems."
