ABSTRACT
The rise in world market prices of energy and raw materials after the mid-1970s was particularly serious for poorly endowed, industrial countries like the German Democratic Republic (GDR). At the beginning of the 1970s rising imports could be financed, to a large extent, by exports, but from the middle of the 1970s onwards, as a delayed consequence of the 1973-7 4 oil shock, the foreign trade and payments situation and the GDR's commodity terms of trade deteriorated markedly. In view of the ambitious growth targets set for the 1981-85 five-year plan, an 'economic strategy of the 1980s' was developed. In the meantime it is worth briefly analysing the change in the pattern of growth which took place in the 1980s. In the centre stands the policy of continuing with the main task in its unity of economic and social policy in the 1980s too.
