ABSTRACT
Czechoslovakia’s economy had been deteriorating already since the beginning of the 1980s. Several attempts at economic reforms at that time, introduced in a hesitant and overcautious way, were aimed only at perfecting the existing mechanism of central administration and rigid Party control. The students’ demonstration in Prague on November 17, 1989, brutally dispersed by the police, represented a final attempt of the increasingly nervous regime to maintain the status quo, but it turned out to be the beginning of a new era in Czechoslovakia. In a European comparison Czechoslovakia, together with other East European countries, is at the bottom of the list concerning many important economic and social indicators. The new economic program states that a functioning market economy is impossible without decentralization of decision-making, the breaking-up of monopolies, without market prices and general macroeconomic equilibrium. The changes in economic legislation were concentrated on the equal treatment of different forms of ownership.
