János Kornai (21 January 1928 – 18 October 2021) was a Hungarian economist[3] noted for his analysis and criticism of the command economies of Eastern European communist states.

[7] From 1958 onwards, Kornai received many invitations to visit foreign institutions, but was denied a passport by the Hungarian authorities and forbidden to travel until 1963, after political restrictions had begun to ease.

Kornai joined the faculty of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1986 and was named the Allie S. Freed Professor of Economics in 1992.

Professor Kornai's early work Overcentralization (1956) created a stir in the West and conveyed for the first time his disillusionment with communist central planning.

It argues that the chronic shortages seen throughout Eastern Europe in the late 1970s and continuing in the 1980s were not the consequences of planners' errors or wrong pricing, but of systemic flaws.

This brings individual responses to the incentives of the system, culminating in observable and inescapable economic phenomena known as the shortage economy.

[16] In 2007 Kornai published a book of memoirs, By Force of Thought, covering his research and the social and political environments in which he did his work.