1 All statistics in Table 1 refer to “commercial trade” only, exclusive of exports on reparations account. In my article “Background and Origins of the Rumanian Dispute with Comecon,” Soviet Studies, October 1964, I mistakenly assumed that the balance of trade for the years 1946 to 1948 reflected the volume of reparations. The data at my disposal, however, referred only to “commercial trade.“

2 Except where indicated, all data in this paper are in valuta lei.

3 The fifth group, live animals, is usually included with foodstuffs in published statistics; I have followed this practice throughout the paper, even in the few cases when separate statistics for this group were available to me.

4 “Products of the armaments industry” may, however, have been included in trade prior to the revision of 1959. In 1953 Czechoslovakia's exports to Rumania were so conspicuously large that a Czech economist was moved to explain that “special circumstances“ had caused “an extraordinary upsurge in the export of products of the machine-building and armaments industries” ( Machová, D., ČSSR v socialistické mezinárodni dělbě práce [Prague, 1962], p. 127 Google Scholar). In that same year the share of machinery and equipment in total Czechoslovak exports to Rumania was 87.9 percent. In view of this high proportion and of the fact that the breakdown of trade into five groups according to the CMEA commodity classification was exhaustive in the source from which this information was taken, it is clear that armaments could not have been concealed anywhere but in the machinery group. In that same year, according to another Czech source, 58.4 percent of total Rumanian imports of machinery and equipment stemmed from Czechoslovakia ( Matý, B., “Hospodářska spolupráce zemí socialistického tábora,” Nová Mysl, No. 10, 1956, p. 1012 Google Scholar). These total machinery imports can be estimated from the old series at 973 million lei. According to a breakdown of Rumanian imports for 1953 the machinery group represented 41.6 percent of total imports; see Probleme economice, No. 5, 1958, pp. 98-99.) Hence machinery and equipment imports from Czechoslovakia should have amounted to 568 million lei. Czechoslovakia's exports of these items to Rumania may be estimated from Czech statistics at 582 million lei, which is quite close to this last figure, considering the errors involved in working with percentages. On the other hand, it can be shown that the value of machinery imports for 1950, when sizable imports of armaments presumably occurred, was not affected by the revision (see the revised data in Anuarul statistic al R.P.R. 1965, p. 439, and the old percentages in Oleinik, I. L., Razvitie promyshlennosti Rumynii v usloviakh narodnogo demokraticheskogo stroia [Moscow, 1959], p. 299 Google Scholar). The question cannot be resolved at this time. In any case, it should be observed that if armaments were included prior to the revision and excluded thereafter, this would be reflected in a reduction rather than in an increase in the value of machinery imports.

5 The percentage increases in the old series are from Information Bulletin, Chamber of Commerce of the Rumanian People's Republic (Bucharest), No. 7, 1956, p. 8; for the new series, see Anuarul statistic al R.P.R. 1965, p. 438.

6 The value of both imports and exports at present includes transportation, insurance, and all other expenses up to the border of Rumania for exports and of the supplying country for imports (Revista de statistica, No. 10, 1964, p. 83). This source contains the most detailed description available of the contents and valuation of foreign trade statistics

7 These data are available on request.

8 75 let svobodnoi Rumynii (Moscow, 1958), p. 242. 9A similar omission was made in the case of Soviet investments in Soviet-Hungarian joint companies in the early postwar period.

10 According to the Soviet economist I. L. Oleinik, the Rumanians had to compensate the USSR “only for that part of the value of the assets of the mixed companies which was supplied directly from the USSR (nepostredstvenno iz SSSR) in the form of raw materials, materiél and equipment.” Compensation was to be carried out in the course of several years in Rumanian lei (Razvitie promyshlennosti Rumynii v usloviakh narodnogo demokraticheskogo stroia, p. 165).

11 Anuarul statistic al R.PR. 1965, pp. 344-45. Note that the revised value of machine imports in 1955 was nearly equal to the investment in imported machinery for that year. If the two figures were comparable, this equality would imply equivalency of the valuta and of the domestic leu—a highly improbable relation, considering the ratios for all other years. The data for 1955 suggest, therefore, that the additional equipment imports registered in the revised series had no counterpart in current investments—as we should expect if they arose from the liquidation of the joint Soviet-Rumanian companies.

12 The Soviet data are from Ekonomicheskoe sotrudnichestvo i vzaimopomoshch’ sotsialisticheskikh stran (Moscow, 1962), p. 250. Czech data for exports of investment assemblies to every socialist country from 1950 to 1956 are contained in Kaigl, V., “Mesto Chekhoslovakii v razdelenii truda,” in Mirovaia sotsialisticheskata sistema khoziaistva (Moscow, 1958), p. 266.Google Scholar

13 Rumania in the International Trade 1944-1964 (Chamber of Commerce of the R.P.R., Bucharest, 1964), p. 70, and Table 6. It may be estimated that from 1948 to 1958 the proportion of complete assemblies to total machinery imports was approximately 25 percent (cf. the cumulative value of such imports until 1958 in Economia Romȋniei íntre anii 1944-1959 [Bucharest, 1959], p . 579).

14 Ekonomicheskoe sotrudnichestvo i vzaimopomoshch’ sotsialisticheskikh stran, p. 249.

15 Imports from capitalist countries, as estimated from the statistics of Rumania's European and North American partners, came to 20 to 30 percent less than the difference between total imports and imports from CMEA. A part of this gap was due to differences in the definition of the machinery and equipment group in OECD and Rumanian statistics. Another part may be accounted for by imports from non-CMEA countries not included in OECD statistics (e.g., Asian Communist countries).

16 Although from the viewpoint of machinery suppliers in the Communist bloc the situation cannot be termed satisfactory, it is not as bad as some observers make it out. For example, the Czech economist Novozámský in a book published in 1964 showed that Rumania's trade in machinery and equipment with CMEA countries had risen only by 20 percent between 1955 and i960. This increase, which he contrasted in a table with comparable data from other CMEA countries, was ostensibly the smallest in the bloc. (Poland, the next lowest on the list, registered a 65 percent increase in machinery trade with CMEA.) Rumania's 20-percent increase also lagged behind the rise in its own domestic machine building, to a greater extent than any other listed country (J. Novozámský, Vryovnáváni ekonomické úrovně zemí RVHP [Prague, 1964], p. 113). These results could only be obtained by computing the increase on the basis of the revised machinery imports for 1955, which were nearly double the original evaluation. Starting with the original statistics, we find that trade turnover with CMEA in these five years slightly more than doubled, as compared to an 80 percent increase for Czechoslovakia and East Germany.

17 See “Background and Origins of the Rumanian Dispute with Comecon,” pp. 128-41.

18 According to J. Novozámský about two thirds of CMEA's imports of chemical equipment came from capitalist states around i960 (Otázky vyrovnáváni ekonomickí úrovně“ evropských socialistickych zemí[candidate dissertation, Prague, July 1962], p. 194).

19 In note 4 above, a Czechoslovak source (B. Malý) was cited which put the share of Czechoslovakia in total Rumanian imports of machinery and equipment as high as 58 percent in 1953. If this percentage refers to imports including armaments, it is not fully comparable with data for later years cited by Vaněk (see sources for Table 6) and with the percentage for 1962 that was computed in Table 6 from Rumania in the International Trade 1944-1964, p. 162.

20 Machová, pp. 201-3.

21 Novozámský, Vyrovnávání, p. 104. These percentages are in principle based on a comparison of exports with total output, both measured in domestic prices.

22 Table 7 and Anuarul statistic al R.P.R. 1965 p. 153.

23 Probleme economice, No. 12, 1957, pp. 35-36.

24 In my article “Background and Origins of the Rumanian Dispute with Comecon” I speculated that the Rumanian upsurge in machinery imports after 1958 had removed one of the causes of tension in its relation to Comecon (pp. 137-38). I did not then realize how little this profited the traditional machinery exporters in the Communist bloc.

25 Between 1962 and 1964 the Soviet Union's surplus in the machinery group seems to have dropped appreciably. Fluctuations in this surplus may in part be attributed to changes in the balance in foodstuffs between the Soviet Union and Rumania. When Rumania sells grain to the Soviet Union, as it did in 1961, 1962, and 1963, it buys machinery in return. But when it imports grain from the Soviet Union, as it did in 1964, it must reduce its purchases of machinery and equipment and increase its sales of these items to keep total trade in balance, thus causing the deficit to shrink. (This was pointed out to me by a Rumanian economist.)

26 This crisis is referred to in several Czechoslovak sources, including Machová, p. 201. Gheorghiu-Dej mentioned in his report to the Central Committee of November 26, 1958, that a rise in exports had made it possible to equilibrate the balance of payments in 1958, with a clear implication that it had not been in equilibrium previously (Economia Romîniei 1944-1959 [Bucharest, 1959], p. 577).

27 On Rumania's credits from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, see Cestmir Konečhy, Socialistický mezinárodní ủvěr (Prague, 1964), pp. 193, 237, and 240. While Rumania obtained some credits from Western Europe, it also incurred new obligations as a result of the signing of compensation agreements. It was not until 1961 that the balance of trade with Western countries began to show a deficit.

28 From information on Rumania's exports of raw materials and foodstuffs to non-socialist countries in 1963 (estimated at 985 million lei and 534 million lei respectively) and from informed guesses about the structure of exports to non-CMEA socialist countries, we may infer that exports of these two categories of goods to all countries outside CMEA amounted to 41 percent of exports to the world as a whole, virtually the same proportion as in 1962 and 1964. This coincidence suggests that the apparent halt in the reorientation was not merely the effect of chance fluctuations in the distribution of trade (for the above data, see A szocialista országok gazdasági együttmükodése [Budapest, 1965], p. 82).

29 Itemized exports of foodstuffs to the Soviet Union increased from 44 million lei in 1958 to 204 million in 1962 (Vneshniaia torgovlia SSSR za 1958-1963 gody [Moscow, 1965], pp. 289-90). If the itemized foodstuffs represented even approximately the same fraction of the total in the group in the two years, the relative loss in the importance of the peoples’ democracies is evident from the statistics.

30 On the basis of a percentage breakdown of raw materials exports to CMEA in Czechoslovak Foreign Trade, No. 10, 1965, p. 7, we can infer that only 43 percent of exports of raw materials of agricultural origin, excluding foodstuffs, went to CMEA. This subgroup, consisting chiefly of lumber and plant fibers, was combined with the foodstuffs group to arrive at the percentage in the text.

31 Julius Lipták, Mezinárodní dělba práce v zemědělství zemí RVHP (Prague, 1965), p. 178, and the same author's “Podmínky mezinárodní socialistické dělbě práce v zemědělství,“ in Vyzkumne práce, No. 52 (Prague, 1963), pp. 54-55 (a mimeographed publication of the Vyzkummy ustav narodohospodařského plánováni); and Politická ekonomie, No. 5, 1965, p. 446.

32 Calculated as the difference between total tonnage exported of the five principal oil products and exports to the Soviet Union (Vneshniaia torgovlia SSSR za 1958-1963 gody, pp. 287-88) and to the peoples’ democracies ( Košnár, J., RVHP: Výsledky a problémy [Bratislava, 1964], p. 152 Google Scholar). Petroleum exports to Western Europe were estimated in OECD statistics at the equivalent in U.S. dollars of 204 million lei in i960, 277 million lei in 1962, and 310 million lei in 1963, at which time they represented nearly 30 percent of the total value of Rumanian petroleum exports ( OECD Statistical Bulletins, Series C, Trade by Commodities, Annual Supplements for January-December 1960, 1962, and 1963 (Paris, 1960, 1962, and 1963)Google Scholar.

33 The tonnages involved were far from negligible by East European standards: in 1960, 203,400 out of 318,600 tons were sold outside CMEA and in 1961, 157,800 out of 381,400 tons (Imre Vajda, Magyarország és a vilag kereskedelme [Budapest, 1965], pp. 190-90.

34 The regional distribution of imports by commodity groups, which is not tabulated in this paper, can be made out by adding the deficits and subtracting the surpluses in Table 9 to and from the exports of Table 8.

35 Directives of the Ninth Congress of the Rumanian Communist Party for the development of the National Economy in the period 1966-70 in Congresul al IX-lea al Partidului Comunist Român (Bucharest, 1965), pp. 756, 765, 768, and 784.