Relationships with the West (and the rest): Trade integration in Socialist Europe, 1945-1989

东欧国家与西方有着许多共同的历史。然而，两国的经济发展却截然不同。工业化主要在20世纪到达这些地区，在某些情况下将在第二次世界大战后完成（Eichengreen 2008）。与此同时，这些国家转向了一种新的社会组织体系——社会主义，它对经济学有着完全不同的理解。在最初的几十年里，它对发展的影响是模糊的。尽管这些国家在20世纪70年代之前确实实现了一些追赶增长，但它们从未达到西方同行的各自发展水平（Bolt和van Zanden 2020）。直到20世纪90年代，接下来的几十年可以被描述为一个相对停滞的时代，随后是向市场体系过渡期间的衰退（Vonyó 2016; Berend 2011）。尽管欧洲地理位置接近，在理解20世纪历史方面也很重要，但我们对社会主义欧洲的经济政策知之甚少。这也包括令人惊讶的贸易政策，因为国际收支问题与对外贸易密切相关，几十年来一直在争论，有时甚至被认为是社会主义垮台的主要原因（Volze 1999）。尽管有大量关于冷战期间东欧经济增长和发展的文献，但对外贸易在其中发挥的作用相对较小，尽管Kukic（2020）指出TFP增长受到它的影响。近年来，出现了两种类型的文学。一方面，经济学家试图量化社会主义政策制定和发展的不同方面，如苏联贸易补贴的规模（Stone 1996）或不断扩大的生产率差距（Broadberry and Klein 2011）。另一方面，历史学家试图在不评估其使用和影响的情况下描述特定国家的贸易政策（例如，参见Eloranta和Ojala 2005）。本项目计划通过使用历史记录来严格评估政策，并解释结果，从而将这两个方面结合起来，为越来越多的关于东欧经济发展的文献做出贡献。

Eastern European countries share a lot of history with the West. Their economic development, however, could hardly be more different. Industrialisation reached these areas mostly in the 20th century and would be completed after World War II in some cases (Eichengreen 2008). At the same time, these countries turned towards a new organisational system of society, Socialism, that had a completely different understanding of economics. Its impact on development is ambiguous in the first decades. Even though these countries did manage to receive some catch-up growth until the 1970s, they never reached the respective development levels of their Western counterparts (Bolt and van Zanden 2020). The following decades until the 1990s could be described as an era of relative stagnation followed by a decline during the transition towards a market-based system (Vonyó 2016; Berend 2011). Despite its geographic proximity and importance in understanding 20th-century history, we know relatively little about economic policies in Socialist Europe. This also includes trade policy which is surprising given that balance of payments issues, which are heavily intertwined with foreign trade, were constantly debated over decades and are sometimes even considered the main cause of the fall of Socialism (Volze 1999).Even though there is substantial literature on the economic growth and development of Eastern Europe during the Cold War, foreign trade plays a relatively small role in it although Kukic (2020) notes that TFP growth was influenced by it. In recent years, two types of literature emerged. On one hand, economists tried to quantify different aspects of Socialist policymaking and development such as the size of Soviet trade subsidies (Stone 1996) or the increasing productivity gap (Broadberry and Klein 2011). On the other hand, historians tried to describe trade policies for specific countries without evaluating their use and impact (see, for example, Eloranta and Ojala 2005). This project plans to merge the two strands by using historical accounts to evaluate policies rigorously and interpreting the results to contribute to the growing literature on Eastern European economic development.