ABSTRACT
National income accounting has become a well accepted tool for keeping track of economic changes in the western countries, but in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) the variations in the aggregate statistics available from different sources are huge, as the next chapter will explain. This study offers an alternative means of following the progress of the economic transitions in CEE. A range of techniques for measuring the efficiency of production are applied to a large sample of firm-level data for Hungary over the period 1985 to 1991. The industries chosen are agriculture, light manufacturing and services. This allows discussion of the structural transformation and inferences on the changing positions of the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors during the early years of the transition, which has attracted little prior attention. The range of techniques allow for different producer objectives, which is particularly necessary when an economic system is undergoing a series of changes in its fundamental institutions, on which the productive activity is based, such as occurs during periods of political and economic transition.
