Congratulations to Sarah Sokhey, a winner of the Ed A Hewett Book Prize
Sarah Wilson Sokhey, ICSID Associate Fellow and Assistant Professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, received the Ed A Hewett Book Prize for her book "The Political Economy of Pension Policy Reversal in Post-Communist Countries" that was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.
The Ed A Hewett Book Prize, established in 1994 and sponsored by the University of Michigan Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies , is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe, published in the previous year and presented at the ASEEES Annual Convention.
Ed Hewett was a distinguished alumnus of the University of Michigan, (PhD, economics), a prominent scholar and an internationally respected member of the field. The Hewett Book Prize was established in his honor to recognize and encourage the high standard of scholarship that he so admirably advanced in the area of his interests.
Book description: Why do governments backtrack on major policy reforms? Reversals of pension privatization provide insight into why governments abandon potentially path-departing policy changes. Academics and policymakers will find this work relevant in understanding market-oriented reform, authoritarian and post-communist politics, and the politics of aging populations. The clear presentation and multi-method approach make the findings broadly accessible in understanding social security reform, an issue of increasing importance around the world. Survival analysis using global data is complemented by detailed case studies of reversal in Russia, Hungary, and Poland including original survey data. The findings support an innovative argument countering the conventional wisdom that more extensive reforms are more likely to survive. Indeed, governments pursuing moderate reform - neither the least nor most extensive reformers - were the most likely to retract. This lends insight into the stickiness of many social and economic reforms, calling for more attention to which reforms are reversible and which, as a result, may ultimately be detrimental.