ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the economic interdependencies that existed among the republics of the former USSR. We show that the level of economic cooperation among the republics was high. The former Soviet republics traded heavily among each other and little with the rest of the world. This high degree of economic integration was caused by the fact that the Soviet Union was a planned economy with a single planning centre. Now that this centre has disappeared and the Soviet Union has broken up, much less intense economic relations among the republics can be expected, and much more trade with the outside world can also be expected. The next chapter attempts to assess future trade flows on the basis of a gravity model. In this chapter we describe the situation as it existed before the fall of Communism. A comparison of the two chapters can be used subsequently to describe what the effects of break-up on the exchange of goods and factors can be expected to be. We describe interrepublican flows of goods, capital and labour as they took place in the former Soviet Union in the third, fourth and fifth sections respectively. On these premises, we subsequently try to indicate future trends in the sixth section. We start by explaining in the next section some of the main difficulties in analysing Soviet economic interrepublican relations.
