ABSTRACT
It is still difficult today, because of an inadequate historical perspective, to assess the importance of the economic reforms implemented in the socialist countries in the middle and at the end of the 1960s. In the West, there has been widespread disenchantment among those who thought that the reforms heralded a decisive change of direction: nothing of the sort in fact happened. However, if a more reasonable attempt is made to judge the reforms according to their own aims, the reserve with which the subject is treated in all the socialist countries is in itself revealing: nowhere, except in Hungary, are the reforms of the 1960s considered as an essential milestone in recent economic development.
