ABSTRACT

In early 1989, when this book was first discussed, the situation was roughly the same in a broad political context in all East European countries. Except for Yugoslavia, they had a common ideological basis in a Marxist ideology and, possibly except for Hungary, an economic situation characterized as a command economy. We define a command economy as one basically reliant upon a planned economy, with a centralized system of decision-making concerning resource allocation, combined with a low degree of democracy in the political system.