You're right about the lack of forced labor camps, but "Stalinist" is how local economists describe the situation.
To give you some idea: if you want to start a company, it will take you a minimum of 40 days to visit various bureaucrats and get permissions.
When you hire employees they will come with union strings and have a Soviet-era worker mindset (i.e., they can do whatever work they want, incompetently or not, and they still expect to get paid, etc.), which is probably where the phrase comes from.
Well then those quote "local economists" are idiots with no sense of history.
"Mildly socialist, corrupt and inefficient" is how any economist who has a brain, local or otherwise, would describe it.
"Stalinist" is for Sarah Palin, the Tea Party and other groups who are more concerned with "impact words" than actually understanding anything.
EDIT: Just to make it more clear how inaccurate and inflammatory that comparison is, Stalin by many estimates killed more people than Hitler. I'll repeat that. Stalin by many estimates killed more people than Hitler. Want to rethink the comparison maybe?
Their references to that term allude to red tape on a large scale, centralized economic planning, indifferent and unmotivated labor, etc., not the death camps and killing.
(And that last phrase reminded me of this: http://bit.ly/bh96ml apropos of nothing).
Yeah but even then, it's not "stalinist", it's "poorly executed social democracy". The government isn't running the farms or producing toilet paper, they just have more bureaucracy than in America, and less well executed than elsewhere in Europe.
To give you some idea: if you want to start a company, it will take you a minimum of 40 days to visit various bureaucrats and get permissions.
When you hire employees they will come with union strings and have a Soviet-era worker mindset (i.e., they can do whatever work they want, incompetently or not, and they still expect to get paid, etc.), which is probably where the phrase comes from.
The Calomiris article goes into more detail.