Statistics

[New Tolerance]

Can you comrades direct me to some economic statistics in the Warsaw Pact countries before the collaspe of the Soviet Union? (Cuba too, if that's not in the Warsaw Pact) Preferably statistics on total GDP, per captia GDP, and economic growth. (Some comparisons with Western states from the same time period will help as well)

Thanks alot.

[Comrade Ceausescu]

http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDe...PL?bi=108629936 (http://dogbert.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=108629936)

This has a lot from Romania.Ceausescu's report to the congress is good and has a lot of that stuff.I'd type it up for you,but its 125 pages.

[Saint-Just]

I have some but I don't have time to put them on the internet. I am sure you can find some if you search on google. Anyway, unemployment rose, production fell after the collapse of the Eastern block.

I'll try and put them on a bit later if I can find them.

[RedComrade]

This site has some great statistics on the Cuban revolution

http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/cu.../factsheet.html (http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/cuba/background/factsheet.html)

Pay particular attention to the following:

Achievements of the Cuban Revolution


1959/1999----------------Rank in Latin America
Life expectancy: 60 yrs/76 yrs #1
Infant mortality rate: 64/1000 7.5/1000 #1
Literacy: 62%/98% #1
Number of Doctors: 3,000/65,000 (1/200) #1
Achievements of the Cuban Revolution

What's more those statistics can be confirmed in the CIA world fact book, the same organisation that attempted to execute Castro over six times.

[New Tolerance]

Thanks alot guys.

[Comrade Ceausescu]

I highly reccomend ordering that book I gave you a link to.It is very enjoyable.

[Saint-Just]

I won't post my statistics as some information has already been given. Anyway, they are interesting.

In the last decade, production has fallen in most former Eastern Block countries. I think the exception is Poland. The black market now plays a very big role in those economies, in the Ukraine I think the black market is bigger.

[Looter]

Russian Economy
http://www.russiaeconomy.org/comments/040501-fig1.gif

[Saint-Just]

Thats generally typical of the entire Eastern Block. Ukraine suffered the most, and Poland has recovered. However, the rest mimic that graph, although they have declined with greater severity.

[Vladimir I. Kropotkin]

Here's an essay i wrote last year containing figures of East European "development", i hope it helps comrade.

Was “shock therapy” successful?

For historians of East European history shock therapy and the success or failure of the post-communist systems in Eastern Europe is an area of critical debate. The proponents of shock therapy argue that it was the only realistic remedy after fifty years of communist command economics, rapid although not without a ‘social cost’, the application of shock therapy would lead Eastern Europe out of the communist shadows and into the bright lights, wealth and prosperity of the western market economy. The opponents of shock therapy argue that it was a disastrous experiment of extreme economic policy that has plunged the vast majority of Eastern European citizens into economic despair, as unemployment soars and living standards spiral below those of the communist days.

The goal of shock therapy was to affect a rapid shift in the mode of production of the former socialist states of Eastern Europe, successfully and efficiently, from a socialist command economy to the capitalist market economic model endorsed in Western Europe and the United States. The critical question is, was this successful? Did shock therapy proceed with complete privatization of state industry and the fostering of western market dynamics, such as consumerism and private ownership, leading to a gradual but marked increase in economic growth and prosperity coupled with an increase in living standards throughout Eastern Europe?

Shock therapy has only been moderately successful in achieving one of its primary objectives, a shift in the mode of production from socialism to capitalism and thus the destruction of the former economic model, through a process of mass privatization. Despite privatization being attempted on a massive scale in Eastern Europe, many thousands of state controlled enterprises remain in the hands of the state. The selling of these enterprises can take one of two forms, each presenting their own problems: “liquidation, where the assets of an enterprise are sold off piecemeal and the enterprise ceases to exist (it is formally bankrupted); and auction, where the enterprise is sold to a buyer and continues to exist as essentially the same firm” (Amdsden A.H. 1993). Neither of these processes have progressed very far in Poland, Hungary, or the Czech Republic, where the state-owned industrial sectors remain intact and unproductive (Amdsden A.H. 1993).
Alice Amdsden in ‘Beyond Shock Therapy’ posits that liquidation has stalled because “the state has been unwilling politically to target the worst bankrupt enterprises, let alone the rest”(Amdsden A.H. 1993). The result of which is that millions of workers in Eastern Europe are dependant on state enterprises that are unproductive and thus not competitive in the new free market system, but to forcibly close these enterprises down would put thousands more out of work, further increasing unemployment in the rural sector, further pushing down wage rates, which exasperates rates the economic disparity creating further turmoil within the state.

Auctioning has also been rare in the East European states because private investment capital is rare, and those with enough capital to bid and purchase the means of production would prefer less risky investments, which offer short-term gains as opposed to investing in state industry which could be prosperous, but which offers little return in the immediate future (Amdsden A.H. 1993). The capital crisis that faced the new free market was exemplified in the ‘8, 273 state-owned enterprises that still remained for sale, this after almost three years of privatization which had resulted in 1,125 of Poland's small and midsize enterprises being liquidated and only 32 firms being auctioned’ (Amdsden A.H. 1993). Even in one of the most developed parts of the former German Democratic Republic, the jewel in the Soviet crown, in the region of Saxony alone, the new German state has only been able to sell only 5 percent of 900 state-owned enterprises to foreign, non-German buyers (Amdsden A.H. 1993).
Moreover, as has been the case in Eastern Europe, shock therapy has had its only real progress in the service sector, as Amdsden quotes, ‘the 30 percent of firms sold to West German companies have mostly been in services, not in the huge industrial sector where it is needed and where unemployment is the highest’(Amdsden A.H. 1993). The question can be raised, as Alice Amdsden does in her article, if in the GDR the most economically developed and well supported of the ex-soviet states, such a limited transformation was only possible, how can the proponents of shock therapy expect so much of the more economically backward states of the Bloc, or even Poland with its 8,000 remaining state enterprises? (Amdsden A.H. 1993).

Shock therapy's primary response to the raging inflation and industrial stagnation has been to lower wages (Amdsden A.H. 1993). Under shock therapy the old rules regulating the ability of enterprises to lay off workers were abandoned leading inevitably to mass lay offs in the industrial sector, which further lowered wage levels (Amdsden A.H. 1993). Under shock therapy it is not and has not been the citizens of the large cities that have suffered the most severe in the transformation, as illustrated by an unemployment rate in Warsaw of “below 2 or 3 percent”(Amdsden A.H. 1993), but the masses in the rural centres, such as the Polish mining region of Silesia and the textile district centered in Lodz, where unemployment has exceeded 25 percent (Amdsden A.H. 1993).The registered unemployment rate was only 1.8 percent in Budapest in September 1991 but nearly five times that in areas with heavy industrial concentrations (Amdsden A.H. 1993).

Following the collapse of Stalinism in Poland in 1989 the country was gripped in an economic crisis in the early months of 1990. The solution presented by shock therapy proponents was to institute wage controls, dramatically reducing the wages of many in order to curb inflation, a tenet of bourgeois economics. Jeffrey Sachs in ‘Shock Therapy in Poland: Perspectives of Five Years’, describes the scene in the country after the wage controls were put in place to curb the inflation:
“Within the first months of 1990, the shortages had been eliminated and the inflation had been reduced decisively, from more than 50 percent per month in late 1989 to around 4 percent per month in mid-1990”(Sachs, J. 1994, p268).
Poland like every other Eastern European state, including Russia, continues to suffer from annual inflation rates significantly higher than the average of the European Union, with inflation in Poland of “around 30 percent per year as of late 1994”, compared to 2.7 percent in the EU (IMF, 2002). Sachs proudly proclaims the end of hyperinflation, despite the persistence of rates of inflation of 30 percent a year “as of late 1994”. As late as 2003, according to International Monetary Fund statistics, “Central and Eastern Europe” enjoyed an inflation rate three times that of the EU figure.

Opponents of shock therapy argue that the burden delegated to Eastern European states, through what the proponents of shock therapy would call a process to “…deepen the new links with the global market economy as rapidly as possible” (Sachs, J. 1994, p268), many would argue in fact is destabilizing and harmful, both to the long-term credibility of the market economy amongst the majority of East European citizens and to the long-term political stability of the region (Amdsden A.H. 1993). A strong proponent of shock therapy, Jeffrey Sachs argues that, “the most radical reforming countries have indeed gone the furthest in restoring stability and laying the foundations for rising living standards” (Sachs, J. 1994, p275).
Sachs goes on to point to the states of Czechoslovakia and Poland as examples of ‘radical reforming countries’, which had thus “outperformed most of the other countries’ (Sachs, J. 1994, p275), he attributes their superior performance to the success of shock therapy. However historically the economic conditions of the Eastern Bloc have been as diverse as the cultures within the states themselves. Countries like Romania and Hungary were at the time of shock therapy still largely agrarian economies, where as Poland and Czechoslaviakia had the most developed domestic industrial sectors in Eastern Europe, thus any comparison is unfair and the results distorted.

Nevertheless shock therapy has been successful in building a thriving service sector in nearly every state in Eastern Europe. Manufacturing exports to Western Europe have risen dramatically, but mainly due to the fact that these sectors were previously grossly underdeveloped, any rise is significant when something approaching naught was the previous figure. This rise in manufactured exports is a result of a marked growth in small private enterprises, in Poland alone by 1994, “approximately two-thirds of the work force was in the private sector, which now counted around 2 million private businesses, most very small family firms” (Sachs, J. 1994, p268).
Consumer durables have successfully proliferated East European society, an illustration of the new market forces of consumerism and private ownership that shock therapy has successfully fostered. However, this dramatic growth is juxtaposed against falling real wage levels and rising unemployment levels outside of the capital cities also the result of shock therapy, thus one must reflect on their own perspective, does access to innumerable consumer goods balance when one is unemployed or the value of your wage is falling or is in fact frozen as a result of wage controls?

The failure of East European states to privatize their economies is not a direct of failure of shock therapy; rather it is a symptom of the failed shift in the mode of production. In attempting to shift from the socialist to the capitalist mode of production a bridge needed to be made to ensure the sucesss of economic reform. Unfortunately shock therapy does not seek to provide this bridge, but in fact seeks to jump the gap between the two systems, transferring from the radical centrally planned command economy to an equally radical attempt at laissez-faire market capitalism, a process which even proponents of shock therapy such as Jeffrey Sachs will not shirk from labeling painful. Thus much still remains to be done in Eastern Europe for shock therapy to be considered a success.
Despite a decade of trying the economies of the east still lag behind their western counterparts, and according to polls conducted in 1999 by domestic polling agencies in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, the majority still feel their standard of living is lower, their capacity to find work is lower, the security of their employment is lower, crime is higher, and with the exception of the Czech Republic, the majority say that their feeling of personal well being and their life in general is poorer post-1989 (Culik, J. 1999), though opinion polls can never be held as incontrovertible fact or even as completely representative, the opinions expressed by the cross-section taken are still valid, and the opinion of the people is that they are worse-off now in nearly all aspects of life than before 1989 and shock therapy.

Whether or not shock therapy has been successful is in a way an unanswerable question, that is, the changes prescribed by shock therapists have yet to bring Eastern Europe into line with Western European prosperity, but this does not mean that they never will. However at this point in time, shock therapy has been in the majority unsuccessful, with inflation and unemployment rates in Eastern Europe still well above the averages in the EU, notwithstanding the rapid growth of private enterprise, shock therapy has not privatized the economy successfully which was key to its goals, state-owned firms still dominate the industrial sector, and the industrial sector still accounts for a larger share of total output of the East European states (Amdsden A.H. 1993), thus the notion that the old system has been destroyed, the most basic tenant of Eastern European shock therapy, has not eventuated.

Bibliography

Amdsden, A.H. 1993, ‘Beyond Shock Therapy’, The American Prospect, vol. 4, no.13, March 21.

Culik, J. 1999, ‘Czech Communist Party’s velvet return’, Central Europe Review, vol. 1, no. 22, 22 November.

Sachs, J. 1994, ‘Shock Therapy in Poland: Perspectives of Five Years’, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, University of Utah, April 6 and 7, pp. 267-289.

International Monetary Fund. 2002, ‘World Economic Outlook’, available at URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2002/02/, September.