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3 - The Socialist Experiment and Beyond

The Economic Development of Eastern Europe

from Part I - Regional Developments

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2021

By
Tracy Dennison  and
Alexander Klein
Edited by
Stephen Broadberry  and
Kyoji Fukao
Stephen Broadberry
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Kyoji Fukao
Affiliation:
Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo
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Summary

Using recent advances in historical national accounts and scholarship of the region, this chapter depicts the economic development of eastern Europe from the times of the Habsburg monarchy and the Russian Empire before World War I through the turbulent interwar years, with the onset of the communist regime and socialist experiment in Russia, the spread of the centrally planned economic system and communist rule in the post-World War II decades, its collapse in the late 1980s and then a decade of transition to market economies. The chapter assesses the region’s economic performance in each of these periods. Even though the path of eastern Europe since the late nineteenth century has been one marked by a series of significant shocks, there were also significant continuities, so that the socialist ‘experiment’ did not result in the significant break with the past that its architects had envisaged.

Keywords

Central planningSocialist experimenttransitioneconomic growthcommunist regimenationalization.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Economic History of the Modern World , pp. 74 - 99
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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