ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to survey the main economic developments of the 1970s and 1980s in the East European countries, and to assess the implications of the pull of Council of Mutual Economic Aid economic integration on the one hand and the attraction of trade with the West on the other. The East European countries vary with respect to size, resource capacity, historical experience, culture, nationality, language, political orientation, level of economic development and economic performance. All East European economies evolved some form of the highly centralised and authoritarian economic model developed by Stalin in the 1930s in the Soviet Union. In Bulgaria, within the wider programme of the ‘New Economic Mechanism’, a number of measures were introduced in 1982–83 to reform certain aspects of the economy. In Poland, a centrally controlled and inefficient heavy industry dominated the economy. Bureaucratically minded managers of the economy opposed all demands for economic liberalisation, fearing that this would diminish their privileges.
