ABSTRACT
Poland and Hungary were two of the three European communist countries (the third was Yugoslavia) which tolerated, and in the 1980s even started to support, small private entrepreneurship within their economic systems. According to acceptable estimates, the private sector’s share in the production of GDP in 1989 may have been 14 per cent in Hungary, even more (28 per cent, largely thanks to the high share of private agriculture) in Poland and, for example, only 0.5 per cent in Czechoslovakia ( OECD 1996: 18).
