ABSTRACT

In order to assess the prospects facing potential Western investors it is useful to analyze the experience made hitherto with similar projects in other socialist countries as well as to review the foreign trade practices in the centrally planned economy (CPE). Each East European country has shown signs of recognition of the fact that the functional separation of foreign trade and domestic production is very inefficient, and has taken various reform steps to tackle this problem. The reform debates, starting in the second half of the 1950s, led to various compromises between the need to decentralize and the desire to maintain the old framework of central control. Two decrees, “On measures for the improvement of the foreign economic relations management” and “On measures for the improvement of economic and scientific-technological cooperation management with socialist countries”, were adopted by the Central Committee of the CPSU and the Council of Ministers in September 1986.