Monthly Report No. 12/2024

Special Issue on Formerly Socialist Economies Analysing socialist economies the first two decades of wiiw publications by Manuel Neubauer As part of its COMECON project, wiiw has digitised hundreds of its publications – more than 45,000 pages in all. As these are now publicly accessible on https //comecon.wiiw.ac.at/, this article serves as a short introduction to wiiw’s early publications, in particular those examining the socialist economies up until 1991. Two of our oldest and most important publications have been providing wiiw’s members with up-to-date research ever since those early days Research Reports and Monthly Reports. Both may serve today as a fascinating survey of developing Western perceptions of the socialist system. A brand new wiiw dataset on the former socialist countries by Artem Kochnev and Monika Schwarzhappel wiiw has compiled an innovative dataset on the nine former socialist countries Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The dataset includes a total of 8,347 economic and social indicators, organised into 11 chapters and spanning the period from 1944 to 1993. Thanks to the significant effort put into data harmonisation, it contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of twentieth-century economic history. Why did socialism collapse? Insights from our new COMECON Dataset by Branimir Jovanović In this article, we explore why the socialist systems in Eastern Europe collapsed around 1990, drawing on our newly digitised wiiw COMECON Dataset. We revisit traditional explanations framed as the ‘jockey’ (policy decisions), the ‘horse’ (inherent systemic flaws) and the ‘racetrack’ (external environment), concluding that the collapse resulted from the interplay of all three factors. If any one of these factors had been different, socialism might well have survived. Monthly and quarterly statistics for Central, East and Southeast Europe