Indique se o item é certo ou errado, com base no Texto a que se refere.

PART I

Wage controls during the transition from central planning to a market economy

Freeing prices to alleviate imbalances has been a priority in most emerging market economies. It is therefore paradoxical that wage controls have been a key component of stabilization in many of these countries.

There is considerable skepticism among economist about the effectiveness of wage controls in general: they are intended to suppress market forces, introducing rigidities in the structure of wages and delaying adjustment to changing labor market conditions; they are often circumvented, and they are typically costly to administer. This pessimism is borne out by the experience of many countries with wage controls, as with other centralized means of wage determination. If wage controls are recommended during the transition to a market economy, therefore, their rationale must be predicated on exceptional circumstances.

As a brake on inflationary momentum, wage controls have figured in “heterodox” stabilization programs in Latin America and elsewhere. The object was to reduce the cost of adjusting an economy to lower rate of inflation by controlling a publicly visible price, limiting the extent to which inflationary expectations become sef-perpetuating. Formerly centrally planned economies have had an added and even more pressing reason for integrating incomes policies into their reform programs and maintaining them as an enduring feature of the economic regime: the weakness of governance of state enterprises by their legal owner, the state.

The weakness of governance has been especially serious at the “no-man’s land” stage, when central planning, with its detailed control of prices and wages, has been dismantled but before market forces have become an effective replacement. At this stage enterprise managers often owe their jobs to workers’ councils; the interests of capital, by contrast, have little representation. At the same time, the “soft-budget” problem - the perception that losses will ultimately be underwritten through subsidies and credit and that the firm will not be allowed to fail - is exacerbated when privatization is impending. Workers and managers, realizing that they have limited time to take advantage of their control of the firm, have little incentive to restrain their wage demands, since the benefits of such restraint would be reaped by the future owners and the state. The extent to which this occurs depends on how privatization is implemented - particularly whether existing stakeholders such as workers and managers are given a share of the privatized value of the firm.

(Coricelli, F. and T. Lane, 1993, The World Bank Research Observer, vol. 8, n°2, July: 195-196).

According to the text:

Item 0 - Free bargaining, not wage controls, is the proper way to ease the transition to a market economy.