Systems’ Adjustments to East-West Economic Cooperation

The growth registered in the exchanges between the centrally planned economies of Eastern Europe and market economies (here-after, CPEs and MEs) constitutes an unquestionable historic fact, characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s. However, the atmosphere surrounding these exchanges has noticeably worsened during the last two decades; it has moved from the euphoric enthusiasm fashionable at the beginning to cool suspicion at the end of the 1970s. We do not intend to analyse in this paper the causes of this reversal, which are political as much as purely economic.