ABSTRACT
At the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s a radical change took place in the world economy. The countries of Central and Eastern Europe gave up central planning and switched over to a market economy approach. They had to-and to some extent they still have to —rebuild their economic systems and adapt their economies to the new conditions. Together with the new economic concept, the political decision structures and the institutional set-up changed (section 8.1). Initially, a collapse of output occurred (section 8.2). Especially the sequence of reform steps was the subject of intense discussions (sections 8.3 and 8.4). A lot of economic problems such as privatization, tightening budget constraints and inflation had to be solved (section 8.5). The international economic aspects of transformation are of particular interest (section 8.6). More than thirty formerly centrally planned economies are in a process of reform at the moment. East Germany is a special case of the transformation process (section 8.7). Already at the end of the 1970s, China had begun to decentralize and to reorganize its economic system, though without changing its political structures (section 8.8). The Soviet Union dissolved into a number of countries, among them Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Uzbekistan and other nations (section 8.9).
