Word: reform
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...matter of policy, how can the U.S. make saving more attractive? Perhaps the most popular suggestion calls for restoring the tax-free Individual Retirement Account contributions that were sharply curtailed under last year's tax-reform law. Introduced in 1974 and liberalized in 1981, IRAs became immensely popular as income shelters. Total IRA contributions grew from an estimated $28 billion in 1982 to $45 billion in 1986. Many economists argued, though, that IRAs did not spur new saving, but simply encouraged the shifting of funds from other investments. Advocates of the retirement accounts, however, contend that IRA contributions were just...
...referendum was unusual enough. Only once before in its postwar history had Poland held such a ballot, in 1946, and the end result was to legitimize the Communist Party that has ruled the country ever since. But when Poland voted last week on a program of economic reform and austerity, something truly unprecedented occurred: a proposal that had the full backing of the government was firmly rejected. It was the first time in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe that the authorities had lost a vote...
...everyone eligible to do so. Thus, ( while approximately two-thirds of those who went to the polls voted in favor of both issues on last week's referendum, both were defeated. Only 44% of Poland's 26 million eligible voters responded affirmatively to a question on economic reform, and 46% okayed a related query on "democratization" in Poland. The decisive margin belonged to the one-third of eligible voters who chose not to participate, many to defy the regime...
...authorities announced price hikes on consumer goods for next year averaging 40%, including 110% increases for food staples like bread and milk. A wave of panic buying swept the country as consumers began hoarding goods of all kinds. The approaching increases only confirmed the public's growing conviction that reform was primarily an excuse for a fresh round of price hikes. The choices posed by the referendum, said a construction worker outside Warsaw last week, amount to "asking a man who will hang whether he wants to put the noose around his neck himself or have somebody else...
...Poland, because the referendum questions were so obliquely phrased, the future course of reform remains very much what authorities want to make it. At week's end Premier Zbigniew Messner announced that the price hikes, originally scheduled for 1988, would be phased in over the next three years. "The government is going ahead with economic reforms," said Letitia Rydjeski, a Vienna-based Poland analyst. "But it will be a tightrope act of introducing increases as high as possible without driving people out on the streets to react." Perhaps. But as last week's vote demonstrated, the streets may no longer...