02919nam a22004577u 4500001001000000003000400010005001700014008004100031040000800072041000800080084002900088100002300117245009400140260008600234300004500320490003100365520161800396650001402014650001402028650001202042650001702054650001302071650002602084650003002110650002002140650001902160650001802179651001302197651001002210651002602220651001702246651001202263651001102275651001202286651002402298651001502322700001902337700002602356830004402382856003502426pwiiw7080OSt20260516120019.0241129t2024    au ||||| |||| 00| ||eng d  cOSt  aeng  aN14aP20aP24aP272jelc1 aGrieveson, Richard10aThe jockey, horse and racetrack revisited:  Why did CESEE’s command economies collapse?  aWien :bWiener Institut für Internationale Wirtschaftsvergleiche (wiiw),c2024.  a57 S., b8 Tables and 25 Figures,c30cm.1 awiiw Research Reportsv477  aWhy did the socialist system that dominated Eastern European countries for much of the 20th century collapse around 1990? Drawing on the newly released wiiw COMECON Dataset and reports that the wiiw was publishing at that time, we explore whether the collapse was due to unfixable systemic flaws of the socialist economies, an unfavourable global environment since the mid-1970s, or policy mistakes made by socialist leaders. Our analysis concludes that all three factors contributed to the collapse. Although the international context – with rising oil prices and interest rates – and the limited openness and competitiveness of socialist economies presented significant challenges, these economies might have survived without the sharp rise in borrowing during the 1970s, the Soviet Union’s squandering of the oil windfall between 1973 and 1985, the failure of Gorbachev’s reforms in the late 1980s, and exchange rate mismanagement in Hungary, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. A particularly grave policy mistake was the Soviet Union’s 1975 decision to replace the fixed five-year oil pricing system with one based on annual adjustments using a five-year moving average tied to world market prices, which exposed the COMECON countries to the full force of the 1970s energy crisis, thereby triggering – or at least catalysing – the system’s collapse. Finally, we also find that extreme weather events played a significant role by causing crop failures, which led to a loss of hard currency export revenues and subsequent current account issues.

wiiw COMECON Dataset:

https://comecon.wiiw.ac.at/
  asocialism  acommunism  aCOMECON  aEastern Bloc  acollapse  asystemic deficiencies  ainternational environment  apolicy mistakes  aclimate crisis  aenergy crisis  aBulgaria  aCESEE  aCSSR - Czechoslovakia  aEast Germany  aHungary  aPoland  aRomania  aUSSR - Soviet Union  aYugoslavia1 aHolzner, Mario1 aJovanović, Branimir 0v477wWIIW0000048twiiw Research Reports40uhttps://wiiw.ac.at/p-7080.html