2012

Honorable Mention: Yoshiko Herrera
Title: Mirrors of the Economy: National Accounts and International Norms in Russia and Beyond (Cornell University Press)

Herrera sets out to explain the speed and comprehensiveness of Russia’s adoption of GDP accounting in the 1990s, a change that was critical for economic measurement and policy evaluation. It is argued that the rapid transition of Russia’s national accounts should be a surprise, given that most other Russian reforms were incomplete, contested, or compromised. Her book proposes an innovative explanation in terms of conditional norms. In the belief system of Soviet statisticians, a socialist economy was best evaluated by material product accounting, and market economies by GDP. When Russia became a market economy, this conditional norm enabled them rapidly to adjust beliefs to new conditions. A textured narrative of rapid organizational reform carried out by insiders, Mirrors of the Economy is thoroughly grounded in the contemporary and historical literatures, complemented by many interviews with Russian principals.

Winner: Carol Leonard