Capitalist Triumphalism in the Eastern European Transition

Abstract

The loss of production volume in the three most studied ‘transitional’ economies of Eastern Europe (Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia) has been about 18 per cent over the last three years (January 1990-December 1992); about 33 per cent in Bulgaria; and very large unknown proportions in Romania, Albania and USSR; though the latest figures show a very mild recovery in Poland in the last quarter of 1992. In face of this huge catastrophe, this conflation-and-revision of my two earliest papers in transitional economics (Wiles, 1991, 1992¹), though hostile and unorthodox on the general ideology of transition, has disappointingly little to say about what more should be done, for it is not clear that these false theories did cause the whole catastrophe or that good ones would have avoided all or even much of it.