Michael Kaser

About Michael Kaser

Michael Kaser (2 May 1926 – 15 November 2021) was a British economist who specialised in Central and Eastern Europe and the USSR and its successor states. He was Reader Emeritus in Economics at the University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, and a Fellow of Templeton College, Oxford. He was also Honorary Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Birmingham. In a trio of books published between 1965 and 1970 Kaser presented a detailed picture of the workings of the socialist planned economies at enterprise, national and international levels. His work sought to apply Keynesian economic theory to the analysis of the socialist planned economies and he identified the systemic problems that were neglected by the ruling communist parties, and which contributed to the disintegration of the economic system at the end of the 1980s.