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Wiki Soviet Planning Contribution
In the Eastern bloc countries (Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Albania), economic planning was primarily accomplished through the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (CMEA), an international organization meant to promote the coordination of soviet economic policy amongst the participating countries. The Council was founded in 1949 and worked to maintain the soviet style of economic planning in the Eastern bloc until the Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991. The Council’s effectiveness and favorability varied from country to country, and fluctuated as decades progressed.

There is a small amount of information in state archives regarding the founding of CMEA, but documents from the Romania state archive suggest that the Romanian Communist Party was instrumental in beginning the process which led to the creation of the Council. Originally, Romania wanted to create a collaborative economic system which would bolster the country’s efforts to industrialize. However, the Czech and Pole representatives wanted to have a system of specialization put into place, wherein production plans would be shared amongst members, and each country would specialize in a different area of production. The USSR encouraged the formation of the Council as a response to the United States’ Marshall Plan, in hopes of maintaining their sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. There also existed the hope that the less developed member states would ‘catch-up’ economically with the more industrialized ones.

During the 1950s, the economic alliance between members of the Eastern bloc and the state monopoly acted as a safety net in the face of Western sanctions being imposed. As a result, the Eastern Bloc countries started to develop autarkic tendencies which would last until the Soviet Union’s dissolution. Trade was also able to grow, not just between member states but within them as well, and the agrarian states of the eastern bloc began to industrialize. The Soviet Union also gave Eastern bloc countries subsidies in the form of raw materials at prices lower than those offered in the global market. However, despite these efforts, varying degrees of development still remained between the industrialized countries and the more agrarian ones, which would contribute to the Bloc’s economic stagnation in later decades.

The Council began to lose its credibility from the 1960s onwards, because disagreements between member countries over the necessity of various reforms led to the slowing of economic growth. In order to encourage economic integration and maintain soviet economic planning, the International Bank for Economic Cooperation was established in Moscow in 1963, and the ‘transferable ruble’ was introduced. The integration failed to materialize for a number of reasons. Firstly, the new currency was separated from foreign trade as is characteristic of centralized planned economies, and so was not able to perform the various functions of money outside of being a unit of account Additionally, integration failed due to a general lack of interest, as well as the implementation of ‘market liberalization’ policies within several member states throughout the decade. Hence, the CMEA switched gears in the second half of the 1960s, and instead a reform was proposed which encouraged countries to pursue their own specialized industrialization projects without the needed participation of all other member states. East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia agreed to these terms, however Bulgaria and Romania did not, and many political officials throughout the Eastern bloc prevented the ‘market liberalization’ policies from being implemented at the CMEA level. The inability for member countries to reach a consensus about economic reforms coupled with the desire to create ‘dynamics of dissent’ within the Council against the USSR contributed to a lack of planning coordination by the CMEA throughout the decade.

In the 1970s, the CMEA adopted a few initiatives in order to continue economic growth and to modernize the economy. Firstly, the Eastern bloc heavily imported technology from the West in order to modernize, increasing the debt of the Eastern Bloc to the West dramatically. In 1971, the CMEA introduced the ‘complex program’, designed to promote further trade integration. This integration plan heavily relied on countries specializing in the production of certain goods and services, and parallel initiatives were discouraged and to be avoided. For instance, Hungary specialized in the manufacturing of buses for local and long-distance transport, which encouraged other member countries to trade with Hungary in order to acquire them.

However, the economic problems of the Eastern bloc continued to increase as reforms failed to pass and specialization efforts failed to incentivize states to improve their products. This resulted in economic growth which paled in comparison to that of the West. In a study assessing the technical efficiency of three Eastern bloc countries (Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia) from the 1970s to the 1980s and comparing it to that of developed and developing countries, it was found that the three European socialist countries were less efficient than both developed and developing countries, and this efficiency gap had only widened in the years of analysis. Additionally, among those three countries, Yugoslavia was consistently the most efficient throughout the period of study, followed by Hungary, then Poland. The raw material subsidies that the Soviet Union had provided since the 1950s were drastically reduced to the point of insignificance by the end of the 1980s, due to Eastern bloc countries having to buy industrial goods at a higher price than what was offered on the global market. The lack of support from the USSR as well as the lack of political consensus over reforms only hastened the decline of the CMEA.