NES Professor Andrei Markevich became a co-author of two chapters for the book The Economic History of Central, East and South-East Europe, 1800 to the Present that was released in late 2020.
The collapse of communism in Central, East and South-East Europe (CESEE) led to great hopes for the region and for Europe. However, three decades on, in many countries the transformation process is incomplete, and the economic catch-up has taken longer than anticipated. Having 17 chapters and written by the new generation of scholars, the book is the first quantitative description of the economic history of CESEE from 1800 to the present day, helping understand the long-term political and economic implications of the region’s historical experience and the preconditions for its current state.
The chapter Economic growth and sectoral developments, 1945-1989 by Andrei Markevich and Tamás Vonyó is dedicated to the post-WWII period which brought significant transformations in the economic, political, and social history of Eastern Europe. Public discourse continues to see in this period the root causes of most challenges specific to this region today and that distinguish it from the western half of the continent. It was the only period in modern times, when the eastern and western parts of the continent followed fundamentally different development paths and applied radically different development strategies. And it was also an age that brought social modernization and economic growth that was, however, behind the dynamics of the Western nations.
Authors come to two important conclusions from the quantitative evidence on socialist economic development. First, economic growth was clearly driven by industrialization, meaning that high growth rates correlated with a growing share of industry in national income. Second, despite some common patterns, differences in growth experience arose between Central Europe, the Balkan economies, and the Soviet Union by the 1980s: the USSR, thanks to her vast exports of hydrocarbons, continued to follow the previous strategy of extensive development while other nations that were oil importers faced a slowdown.
The following chapter Economic policy under state socialism, 1945-1989, also co-authored by Andrei Markevich and Tamás Vonyó describes the model of the command economy, which was implemented first in the Soviet Union by Joseph Stalin and spread to other countries of Eastern Europe after the war. The authors demonstrate how ideology interacted with economic and geopolitical conditions in shaping the economic institutions and economic policy. CESEE governments nationalized most sectors of economic activity and replaced the market allocation of resources with a command system. Firms and citizens in these countries depended on government decisions to a much larger extent than in the conventional market economy, and the high level of manual control over the economy required constant coordination of activities of numerous economic agents in the absence of effective price signals.
Discussing the contribution of economic policy to the collapse of state socialism in the late 1980s, Markevich and Vonyó ask to what extent political factors rather than the intrinsic inefficiency of the socialist system determined its fate. They also note that the history of economic policy under state socialism is a reminder about the effective limits of state intervention in the economy.
You can learn more about the book contents and order a copy here.