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The economies of Eastern Europe
JOURNAL
OF COMPARATIVE
ECONOMICS
8, 478-479 (1984)
ADAM ZWASS, The Economies of Eastern Europe. &monk,
N.Y.: M. E.
Sharpe, 1984. ix + 17 1 pp., index. $30.00. This volume, simultaneously published in the International Journal of Politics (X111:3-4), is a partial translation (by Michael Vale’) of the second part of a book, Die PIanwirtschafi im Wandel der Zeit (1982). It is translated as The Economies of Eastern Europe and it is the second book by the author published by M. E. Sharpe (the first was Monetary Cooperation Between East and West, 1975). The author’s purpose in this volume is “to give a more complex description of the problems than has previously been available . . . as an insider.” He left Eastern Europe in 1969 after having worked in central banking in Poland and in the CMEA Secretariat with responsibilities for financial settlements and IBEC. His main conclusion is that recent problems in Eastern Europe, most dramatically represented by the case of Poland, are not cyclical, but a crisis of the system. His arguments and evidence are presented in six chapters. Four cover individual countries and one includes both the GDR and Czechoslovakia, as the two countries that were industrialized before the Second World War. The final chapter, somewhat mistitled “Coexistence and Cooperation Are Better than Confrontation,” is a general summary of the purported failures of the Soviet-type system applied in Eastern Europe. It ends with a short section called “Prospects” which the author begins by saying, “The successes and failures of the reform movement indicate the direction of future development.” Unfortunately, the author fails to make it clear what that future development will be. Is it reform or catastrophe? The material covered in the country chapters is extremely uneven in quality and quantity. Straightforward comparisons across countries are hard to find. Finally, it is nowhere obvious what principle of analysis Zwass is using or wants us to use. This renders his conclusion more an opinion, for it would require a more careful estimate of the impacts of external events on the East European economies, plus clearer support of why Zwass believes that investment policies must always lead to the severe disequilibrium found in the late 1970s in Poland and Romania. These shortcomings do not recommend the book to an uninitiated reader. Also, they make the book very hard to review because it reads like six relatively disconnected essays. Of the six countries, the case of Poland is treated most thoroughly and seemed to come closest to the author’s purposes of telling something not I The translaterought to be faulted for his useof “Dakers” insteadof “Dacians” (p. 85). 0147-5967184$3.00 Copyrig 0 1984 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form rewwd.
478
BOOK REVIEWS
419
already known, with some insider’s points of view. This reviewer did not know, for example, that Oskar Lange was an advocate of workers’ codetermination (p. 125). Here, as elsewhere, a footnote should have indicated Zwass’s source. In the cases of the two countries, Bulgaria and Romania, for which this reviewer has special knowledge, Zwass’s treatment offers nothing new. Instead, it is a bit colored by conventional wisdom. For example, according to Zwass, collectivization in Bulgaria was not resisted as much as in Poland because Bulgaria had gotten rid of its large landowners much earlier. In theory Bulgarian peasants would have resisted collectivization and, indeed, did. According to Zwass, Hungary’s high degree of trade dependence explains its resistance to a Soviet-type system. Should that not also have caused problems in Bulgaria? It is no less dependent on imported materials and energy. In Romania’s case, its nationalism, according to Zwass, derived “from the fact that hardly any other nation has had its national sensibilities more severely wounded. . . .” Who would want to defend this idea in front of Poles, Hungarians, or even Bulgarians? Perhaps Zwass meant to add “. . . by the country’s own leaders.” As a narrative of postwar events in Eastern Europe, this book has big gaps. Hungary’s case is virtually ignored before 1968. Nearly half of the discussion of Czechoslovakia is on the pre- or early postwar period; then it jumps to 1968. The middle period is also mostly ignored in the cases of the GDR and Bulgaria. Regretfully, this and other aspects of Zwass’s treatment of his subject suggests that he chose his material rather arbitrarily. Zwass is very ready to render grave opinion with little substantiation. An example is a statement on page 4 that Hungary’s reform surely would “have been even more successful if the decentralization of the steering of the economy had been accomplished by a democratization of political power.“2 Or, on the same page, he remarks that Radar understood quite well that under “conditions [of the early 1960~1 a revision to the chaotic conditions of 1956 was a real threat.” Here the reader deserves more explanation and documentation. Some insider’s knowledge would have been welcome, but none seems to have been offered. Perhaps the problem with this book is that its scope went well beyond Zwass’s own experience. Most of his material seems to come from secondary sources. Those did not include a rich literature in English, if we judge by the footnotes. Possibly this oversight is why Zwass assumed he could improve the record. MARVIN R.JACKSON
Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona 85281
* In a similarly arbitrary spirit, Zwass states (p. 43) that planning practices “had indeed always been better in the GDR than elsewhere.” It may be asked in what respect? Possibly by not planning very much, for he notes (p. 44) that only in 1980 did the Germans introduce targets for “rationalization” and science and technology. Such targets had long been in place in other planned economies.
OF COMPARATIVE
ECONOMICS
8, 478-479 (1984)
ADAM ZWASS, The Economies of Eastern Europe. &monk,
N.Y.: M. E.
Sharpe, 1984. ix + 17 1 pp., index. $30.00. This volume, simultaneously published in the International Journal of Politics (X111:3-4), is a partial translation (by Michael Vale’) of the second part of a book, Die PIanwirtschafi im Wandel der Zeit (1982). It is translated as The Economies of Eastern Europe and it is the second book by the author published by M. E. Sharpe (the first was Monetary Cooperation Between East and West, 1975). The author’s purpose in this volume is “to give a more complex description of the problems than has previously been available . . . as an insider.” He left Eastern Europe in 1969 after having worked in central banking in Poland and in the CMEA Secretariat with responsibilities for financial settlements and IBEC. His main conclusion is that recent problems in Eastern Europe, most dramatically represented by the case of Poland, are not cyclical, but a crisis of the system. His arguments and evidence are presented in six chapters. Four cover individual countries and one includes both the GDR and Czechoslovakia, as the two countries that were industrialized before the Second World War. The final chapter, somewhat mistitled “Coexistence and Cooperation Are Better than Confrontation,” is a general summary of the purported failures of the Soviet-type system applied in Eastern Europe. It ends with a short section called “Prospects” which the author begins by saying, “The successes and failures of the reform movement indicate the direction of future development.” Unfortunately, the author fails to make it clear what that future development will be. Is it reform or catastrophe? The material covered in the country chapters is extremely uneven in quality and quantity. Straightforward comparisons across countries are hard to find. Finally, it is nowhere obvious what principle of analysis Zwass is using or wants us to use. This renders his conclusion more an opinion, for it would require a more careful estimate of the impacts of external events on the East European economies, plus clearer support of why Zwass believes that investment policies must always lead to the severe disequilibrium found in the late 1970s in Poland and Romania. These shortcomings do not recommend the book to an uninitiated reader. Also, they make the book very hard to review because it reads like six relatively disconnected essays. Of the six countries, the case of Poland is treated most thoroughly and seemed to come closest to the author’s purposes of telling something not I The translaterought to be faulted for his useof “Dakers” insteadof “Dacians” (p. 85). 0147-5967184$3.00 Copyrig 0 1984 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form rewwd.
478
BOOK REVIEWS
419
already known, with some insider’s points of view. This reviewer did not know, for example, that Oskar Lange was an advocate of workers’ codetermination (p. 125). Here, as elsewhere, a footnote should have indicated Zwass’s source. In the cases of the two countries, Bulgaria and Romania, for which this reviewer has special knowledge, Zwass’s treatment offers nothing new. Instead, it is a bit colored by conventional wisdom. For example, according to Zwass, collectivization in Bulgaria was not resisted as much as in Poland because Bulgaria had gotten rid of its large landowners much earlier. In theory Bulgarian peasants would have resisted collectivization and, indeed, did. According to Zwass, Hungary’s high degree of trade dependence explains its resistance to a Soviet-type system. Should that not also have caused problems in Bulgaria? It is no less dependent on imported materials and energy. In Romania’s case, its nationalism, according to Zwass, derived “from the fact that hardly any other nation has had its national sensibilities more severely wounded. . . .” Who would want to defend this idea in front of Poles, Hungarians, or even Bulgarians? Perhaps Zwass meant to add “. . . by the country’s own leaders.” As a narrative of postwar events in Eastern Europe, this book has big gaps. Hungary’s case is virtually ignored before 1968. Nearly half of the discussion of Czechoslovakia is on the pre- or early postwar period; then it jumps to 1968. The middle period is also mostly ignored in the cases of the GDR and Bulgaria. Regretfully, this and other aspects of Zwass’s treatment of his subject suggests that he chose his material rather arbitrarily. Zwass is very ready to render grave opinion with little substantiation. An example is a statement on page 4 that Hungary’s reform surely would “have been even more successful if the decentralization of the steering of the economy had been accomplished by a democratization of political power.“2 Or, on the same page, he remarks that Radar understood quite well that under “conditions [of the early 1960~1 a revision to the chaotic conditions of 1956 was a real threat.” Here the reader deserves more explanation and documentation. Some insider’s knowledge would have been welcome, but none seems to have been offered. Perhaps the problem with this book is that its scope went well beyond Zwass’s own experience. Most of his material seems to come from secondary sources. Those did not include a rich literature in English, if we judge by the footnotes. Possibly this oversight is why Zwass assumed he could improve the record. MARVIN R.JACKSON
Arizona State University Tempe, Arizona 85281
* In a similarly arbitrary spirit, Zwass states (p. 43) that planning practices “had indeed always been better in the GDR than elsewhere.” It may be asked in what respect? Possibly by not planning very much, for he notes (p. 44) that only in 1980 did the Germans introduce targets for “rationalization” and science and technology. Such targets had long been in place in other planned economies.