Branko Horvat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Branko Horvat (24 July 1928 - 18 December 2003) was Croatian economist and politician. He worked a long time at the Institute of Economic Sciences, the former Planning Institute of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. He was the editor of the journal Economic Analysis and Worker’s Self-Management, and collaborator of the journal Praxis, to which he contributed much from the economic viewpoint, though he was not a member of that group. He was also a member of the Economic Institute of Zagreb.

Horvat had tried to unite democratic forces on a common platform, but without much success. He was highly critical of the economic policy of the Franjo Tuđman government (as he was before of the communist). He advocated a sort of market socialism, a combination of social democracy and market economy. In 1992 he founded and became president of the Social Democratic Union. Horvat organized a Balkan Conference with the primary aim of restoring cooperation between Yugoslav forces.

His most widely known study is The Political Economy of Socialism (published in 1982 in English, in 1984 in Croatian, and in 2001 in Chinese). The American Society of Economists has nominated Horvat for the Nobel Prize for economy for this study.